This frankly has terrifying implications, The Government is REALLY reaching here in trying to brand protesters as domestic terrorists and connect them with some sort of "International Antifa Conspiracy" when there's no such thing.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/17/antifa

A jury in Texas has convicted eight people in the first federal anti-terror case since the Trump administration declared “antifa” a terror group. Nine defendants alleged to be members of an “antifa terror cell” stood trial on federal and state charges including rioting, using explosives and attempted murder. The charges stemmed from their attendance at an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail on July 4, during which fireworks were set off and a police officer was shot and wounded. Eight protesters now face at least 15 years in jail. Their legal teams plan to appeal. “The antifa of it all, from my perspective, was purely political,” says one of the defendants’ attorneys, Xavier de Janon, who joins Democracy Now! to break down the case.

AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show in Texas, where a federal jury Friday convicted eight anti-ICE protesters on terrorism charges in a closely watched trial that’s raised fears over the Trump administration’s intensifying crackdown on activists and First Amendment rights. This marked the first time terrorism charges were successfully brought against activists by the Justice Department, as federal prosecutors accused the protesters of being members of antifa. The trial focused on a shooting that happened during a protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas, last year. A total of nine protesters stood trial at a packed Fort Worth courtroom facing an array of federal charges, including attempted murder. The protesters were also indicted on state criminal charges.

For more, we go to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we’re joined by Xavier de Janon, an attorney with the People’s Law Collective and the National Lawyers Guild, has provided legal assistance to the DFW Support Committee, a coalition that’s assisting over a dozen activists who were arrested at the Prairieland protest last July. He represents one of the defendants, Elizabeth Soto, in the state case. Soto and seven others involved in the Prairieland protests were convicted Friday on federal terrorism and other charges.

Thank you so much for being with us, Xavier. If you can start off by explaining what happened that day and what these charges are that these eight protesters were convicted of, and what they face?

XAVIER DE JANON: Good morning. Yes, happy to be here and to be able to give more information.

I think, after the trial, that I was able to see in some — in some weeks, I wanted to present what happened, based on some of the protesters’ perspective. I mean, what happened on July 4th, 2025, was a noise demonstration. And we heard during the trial that if you were someone, you know, who was interested in immigrant justice, in immigrant rights in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and you happened to join a very large Signal group chat that had political announcements, events and rallies and so on, you would have found out about the noise demonstration on July 4th, 2025. And if you decided to go, you would have been there with other activists, protesters —

AMY GOODMAN: Xavier, just to be clear, you’re talking about a noise protest?

XAVIER DE JANON: Yes, a noise demonstration. A noise demo is a very common type of protest that happens outside of prisons and jails. And usually they happen in loud days — right? — Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve. And what people do outside is just literally noise. The purpose is to get people inside to remember that they’re not forgotten, that they are seen, that they are heard. And that is what was happening on July 4th. There was a flyer: “Noise demonstration. Come. Make Noise.”

What was different is that there were fireworks. And for me, this isn’t so uncommon. I have seen noise demos across the country that also feature fireworks. But it was after the fireworks were shot that — around the facility, that the people inside, the wardens, called 911. The fireworks did not damage anything. This was very clear on trial. The fireworks did not even hit any fence, any part of the buildings. It was raining that day.

But, unfortunately, as people were leaving — that was seen on the videos, we heard from the officers — people were leaving as the police was arriving. One of the — the first arriving officer from Alvarado Police Department got off his car, drew his firearm at some of the protesters, and then shots were fired in his direction, and then the officer shot back. So, what happened was a noise demonstration that anyone could have gone to, and, unfortunately, shots fired back and forth after the officer drew his firearm.

The charges, unfortunately, were not only material support for terrorism. They were riot. They were using explosives in the commission of a felony, the fireworks, and then a range of attempted murder charges, which, of all those charges, only one person was found guilty, the person alleged to have shot the rifle.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Xavier, could you talk about the federal prosecutors’ attempt to accuse all of the protesters of being part of antifa?

XAVIER DE JANON: Yes. So, what we heard from the federal government since July 4th, 2025, is descriptions that are similar to what we’re hearing in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Portland and now in Vermont, that people who are standing up for immigrants are terrorists, are antifa, are masked villains, are wearing black to be disguised and never been found. During the trial, we heard repeatedly the reference to something they call the “North Texas Antifa Cell.” The Department of Justice still says this is a thing. But then we heard from cooperating defendants explaining that no such thing exists, that they didn’t even know that they were a part of antifa to begin with, as the government alleges.

So, this case, although it is the federal government’s first successful antifa trial, it actually didn’t even need antifa to have any convictions. The convictions — riot, material support for terrorism, attempted murder, use of explosives — don’t even need an organization, or that there is even a terrorist organization. The antifa of it all, from my perspective, was purely political. And we saw that from the so-called expert that the government used.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we have only a minute, but could you talk about some of the witnesses for the prosecution and their connections to right-wing organizations?

XAVIER DE JANON: Yes. So, really, the biggest witness that the prosecution presented was Kyle Shideler, I believe is his last name. And he was presented as the expert on antifa for the government. He actually works for a think tank that has been considered a hate group. And the director of that think tank has been exposed as being Islamophobic and having all these very right-wing, very conservative beliefs. This person got on the stand, and he actually admitted that he helped write the indictment for the federal government. So, the so-called expert on antifa, which even the judge wasn’t impressed about, was also the one who wrote this antifa indictment for the federal government.

I mean, beside him, we had dozens and dozens of officers from every imaginable agency — FBI, ATF Alvarado Police, Johnson County, other towns’ police — all called on the scene after the shooting occurred after the July 4th noise demonstration.

AMY GOODMAN: Xavier, we just have 15 seconds. What happens next? They’ve been convicted of terrorism, eight of these protesters, facing at least 15 years in jail each?

XAVIER DE JANON: Yes. What’s next is that the fight continues. There will be post-trial motions. There will likely be appeals. And as you mentioned, there are a lot of state cases that are still pending, not just for these defendants, but for other defendants that never had federal charges from the same event. And so, the battle will go on in North Texas. And hopefully, more people can support these supporters through their own resources, through attorney connections.

Yup, he's gone full megalomaniac. It's not going to happen, though,

ttps://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/17/cuba_electrical_grid

Cuba’s electrical grid has collapsed. The island-wide blackout comes amid a harsh U.S. oil blockade and recent comments from President Donald Trump that he wants to “take” Cuba. No oil shipments have reached the country, located just south of Florida, in three months, compounding a humanitarian crisis caused by decades of severe U.S. sanctions. “Sanctions are literally killing people right now,” says Cuban journalist Daniel Montero, speaking from Havana. “We understand what this oil embargo means, and [what] sanctions have always meant. This is regime change through starvation.” Historian Sara Kozameh, who recently returned from Cuba, adds, “Cubans have fought for sovereignty many, many times. And they’re not going to just sort of lie there while this is happening.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Cuba plunged into an island-wide blackout, leaving millions of people without power after the national electricity grid completely collapsed Monday. This was at least the third and the largest blackout to hit Cuba in just about four months, as the U.S. energy blockade has cut off the island from accessing desperately needed fuel. No oil shipments have reached Cuba in more than three months, according to the Cuban government, compounding a humanitarian crisis caused by decades of U.S. sanctions.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported Monday, Trump’s negotiators told their Cuban counterparts during recent talks that Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel must be removed from power. President Trump spoke to reporters at the White House Monday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I do believe I’ll be the honor of — having the honor of taking Cuba. That’d be a good honor. It’s a big honor.

REPORTER: Taking Cuba?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Taking Cuba in some form, yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it — think I can do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: “Whether I free it, take it” or “can do anything I want with it,” President Trump said.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Havana, we go to Daniel Montero, Cuban journalist and producer with Belly of the Beast, an independent media outlet covering the impact of U.S. sanctions on Cuba. And in San Diego, California, we go to Sara Kozameh, assistant professor in history at University of California, San Diego, who’s just returned from Cuba, her recent piece for The Guardian headlined “In the other US target of regime change, Cuba, I saw real hardship — and resilience.”

But, Daniel, let’s turn to you right now in Cuba. Talk about this largest blackout that we have seen, what it means for the people, what it means for Cuba and what’s happening.

DANIEL MONTERO: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

I mean, what’s really heartbreaking about this, this latest blackouts that we have, is that at this point, you know, for our daily lives, it doesn’t feel any — you know, that much different from normal days. What I’m trying to say is, because no fuel is coming in, I mean, blackouts have extended significantly over the past few months. You know, right now in Havana, which usually fares a lot better than the rest of the country, we’re talking about at least 12 hours a day. You go to the provinces, like, you know, outside of the city, where my family lives, they’re getting by with three, four or five hours a day. So, of course, a national blackout has tremendous impact throughout, but what I’m trying to convey is that because blackouts have extended so much due to the oil blockade, it doesn’t feel that different.

Right now the power grid is coming back on. It usually takes them about a whole day to bring it entirely throughout the country, and authorities have said that precisely because there’s less fuel, it takes them longer to bring back the grid. But, of course, the consequences of this, I mean, not just the national blackout, but the oil blockade as a whole, it’s tremendous. I think for the first time in my life, the sanctions, you know, feel completely unavoidable. I think you cannot find someone in Cuba that’s not being affected by the current state of affairs.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Daniel, what about the fact that even Latin American countries that have had long relations with Cuba and have progressive governments, like Brazil and Mexico, and are also oil exporters, that they have not stepped forward more strongly to assist Cuba with oil?

DANIEL MONTERO: I mean, I think that just speaks to the world we’re living in, right? I mean, Trump has exerted all of the pressure he can on other countries. And sadly, it has worked so far, and we’re just living through the results. Of course, it saddens me. As a Cuban, I suffer it every day. You know, this is not some abstract or theoretical notion for me. You know, we suffer it every day, and it’s terrible. I mean, we’re talking about — I have no other way to describe it, as sanctions are literally killing people right now, you know, because the conditions are so bad. And this has everything, absolutely everything, to do with what the U.S. is doing to my country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And how do you react to this announcement of the Cuban government that it will now be allowing Cuban Americans to own businesses and invest in the island?

DANIEL MONTERO: I think that is actually a news that was rather positively received by people in Cuba. I mean, you have to understand that over the past 15 years the country has been progressively opening up to investment, coming from the outside and also from the inside of the country. So that is actually something that didn’t necessarily surprise anyone listening to the news, and that most people have no problem with.

AMY GOODMAN: And what President Trump said from the Oval Office, Daniel, how it’s being received in Cuba, that the U.S., that President Trump would take it or free it or whatever, but that that’s going to happen very soon, and the demand that the Cuban President Díaz-Canel must leave?

DANIEL MONTERO: It is absolutely outrageous. I mean, we’re talking about — the idea of a negotiation or a talk between two countries cannot start with the premise of one of the parties stepping out. So, if the goal was to actually come to an agreement and to actually improve the lives of the Cuban people, then that would not be the premise. But, of course, this does not surprise us. We understand what this oil embargo means and what it has always meant, what sanctions have always meant. This is regime change through starvation. That is what they’re trying to do.

And right now with the oil blockade, conditions are worse than they ever have been. So, you know, as a Cuban, as someone living here, with all of my family is here, it is absolutely outrageous to listen to, you know, Donald Trump and the administration in the United States saying that they’re trying to help Cuba, they’re trying to liberate Cuba, because they don’t articulate the price that they’re asking people to pay. Sure, they’re saying that they want freedom, they want democracy, they want — they talk about all of these good things that they’re going to bring to the Cuban people. But they should really articulate the means to get there. The means to get there is the Cuban people suffering, is the Cuban people dying.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you experienced in Cuba — we have the reports of — a magnitude 5.8 earthquake this morning, on top of the national blackout?

DANIEL MONTERO: Yes, in the east of the country, it is not very uncommon to have this, these quakes. Fortunately, they don’t usually actually cause that much damage out there. But, you know, at this point, it just feels like: What else is going to happen?

You know, I look back at — in January, I found myself at home. You know, Maduro’s abduction had just happened. And, you know, the idea of an actual U.S. invasion to Cuba for the first time became very real in my head. And we happen to live very close to a military base here in Havana. And I found myself having a conversation with my wife and, you know, basically just thinking, “What room in the house do you think we would survive if they bomb?” And by the end of the conversation, we were just looking at each other and going, like, “Can you believe we’re even having this conversation?”

And I think that’s just the general feeling of being in Cuba right now with everything that’s coming from Washington: What else is going to happen? When is this going to stop?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in Sara Kozameh, assistant professor in history at the University of California, San Diego. Professor, you’ve been — you’ve visited Cuba over the years, and particularly in the rural parts of the country. You recently returned from Cuba. Could you talk about what you saw and the conditions there?

SARA KOZAMEH: Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

And, you know, I’d just like to say, my experience is very consistent with what Daniel was just explaining. You know, the east is much farther from the ports, in which petroleum and food arrives, and so they have many — they have fewer resources. The situation is much harder. There have been prolonged blackouts for — that have lasted many hours more than they’ve lasted in Havana, for months now, but those have gotten worse in the last few weeks. So, when I was there, they were getting maybe 16 hours of blackouts, and maybe twice a day, three hours of electricity. And within the period that I was there, it was reduced to maybe three hours of electricity a day. And right now it seems that people have gone at least 25 hours, 26 hours since electricity at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask Daniel about the response of the Cuban people. Obviously, like we saw with Iran, I mean, you have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu urging people to rise up in Iran. He says you can, you know, take people to water, but you can’t make them drink. President Trump was urging that. What do you see happening? Are people angrier at the United States or at the Cuban government at this point?

DANIEL MONTERO: I think when you’re hungry, your politics are “I want food.” You know? I think for the majority of people, that’s what they’re feeling. Look, I don’t see, you know, the goal that the U.S. is trying to achieve here, which is the majority of the people rising up. That simply hasn’t happened. There are minor protests, you know, when the blackouts happen, but that’s been happening for the past five years. That is not new. So, like, that change that, you know, the U.S. is hoping to achieve in Cuba is simply not happening right now. I think people are very aware of what’s going on. And they’re, you know, paying the price of the decisions that have been made. But they’re more concerned with “What do I do today? What do I eat tonight?” than anything else, because, as I said, you know, when your concerns are as pressing as those, that is the extent of your politics.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask also, Professor Kozameh: This Trump claim that the leadership of Cuba must change, that he will decide, this absolute narcissism of our president, that he decides, that he’s the one that makes — that he’s the one that makes change in every one of these countries, your sense of how this is being received among the Cuban people?

SARA KOZAMEH: Yeah, I mean, so, I think it’s not being received well. When I was there just a few weeks ago, I spoke to many people, and I asked them straight up, like, “What do you want to happen? What would you like to see?” And even people who have — you know, who were vocal critics of the political system, and some who were less vocal critics of the political system, nobody — nobody agreed with what Trump was doing. None of them.

And so, I think, you know, Cubans are a highly educated population. They have access to the news. They understand the maneuvers. They understand the tactics. And I think right now they’re feeling really blindsided. They just — you know, it was confirmed on Friday that the government is in negotiations with the United States. And so, the process of sort of, like, understanding and processing that was just beginning on Monday, yesterday, when this announcement happened. And I think, you know, multiple, multiple people told me, with outright anger in their voices, that they wouldn’t allow this, something like this, that they would fight back. So, you know, ultimately, Cubans have fought for sovereignty many, many times, and it doesn’t seem that they’re going to just sort of lie there while this is happening again.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute, and I want to go back to Daniel in Havana, Cuba, about this convoy that is headed to Cuba, many groups involved, including Progressive International, CodePink. How much of a difference at this point does international solidarity make and mean?

DANIEL MONTERO: I would argue that international solidarity is now more important than ever, especially coming from the United States, because, I mean, what everyone is hearing about Cuba is this oil embargo, is how everything is so bad in the country. I mean, the idea of having people coming over and showing a different face coming from the United States, and showing that, you know, we can still help each other, I think this is — I would argue Cuba has needed solidarity for a while now, but it certainly needs it right now.

In terms of the difference it can actually make, I mean, it depends on what they bring in. We need everything that anyone can bring in at this moment. But I think the most important part is the symbolic value of having all of these people coming over and showing their support for the Cuban people, to fight the narrative that’s coming from the Trump administration.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm8g938erdo
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/.....rait-of-hormuz
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026.....ilitary-action

The Hormuz Strait has long been known to be a choke point completely under Iran's control. It's hard to know what Trump is thinking here. This is just another sign of how he doesn't know WTF he's doing.

Trump has called on NATO allies and affected Asian countries to assist in opening the strait, threatening that it would be "very bad" for the future of NATO if members did not help get the critical waterway open and that he could also delay his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping. “It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there." NATO has no responsibility to help with this, because no NATO member was attacked.

Trump has said the US will keep bombing the shoreline and Iranian vessels to "soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!" but has also called on other countries to send warships.

"Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated."
-China is an ally of Iran, and is in negotiations to alllow shiipments of petroleum products through the Hormuz Strait. I doubt they'd want to fuck those up by cooperating with the US.

"I'm demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory," Trump said about the strait, claiming the shipping channel is not something the United States needs because of its own access to oil. Trump spoke while answering reporters' questions as he flew back to Washington from Florida aboard Air Force One.

Trump said China gets about 90% of its oil from the strait, while the U.S. gets a minimal amount. He declined to discuss whether China will join the coalition.

"It would be nice to have other countries police that with us, and we'll help. We'll work with them."

“Numerous countries have told me they’re on the way. Some are very enthusiastic about it, and some aren’t,” Trump said.

When subsequently asked which countries had pledged to join, Trump responded “I’d rather not say yet”, adding that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be making an official announcement.

“They’ve already started to – it takes a little while to get there,” Trump said. “In some cases, you have to travel an ocean. So doesn’t go that fast, but it’ll go fast. And we have some that are fairly local that are doing it.”
-This appears to be wishful thinking.

Trump also said that we don't really need anyone to help us do this, but that he "Found it interesting" to see who would come to our aid.

Newt Gingrich, ever the reasonable one, has advovated nuking the Hormuz Strait to widen it.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently shared a proposal suggesting that the U.S. should detonate nuclear weapons in the Strait of Hormuz. Gingrich suggested that "A dozen thermonuclear detonations" could create a new, wider channel through the region, ostensibly to reopen the shipping route.
-Not so sure ol' Newt is still right in the head.

No one is biting on this, no matter how affected they are, because they put the blame for this on Trump, and realize how futile it is to try to get out of this through any way but negotiating with Iran. They seem to be applyng the "Pottery Barn Rule": "You broke it, you bought it".

And no one is doing anythingb to stop it

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3.....ormuz_orly_noy

Democracy Now! speaks with Iranian Israeli political activist Orly Noy about her recent piece, “Longing for My Tehran.” “It’s been a very emotional time since the beginning of the war, not just because we are constantly running in and out of shelters,” says Noy, “but because this time, the footage of the bombing that I grew accustomed to seeing for over two years from the genocide in Gaza was now coming from my homeland.”

Noy also comments on Israeli political support for the war on Iran, saying “the very few attempts to protest against the war were brutally crushed by the Israeli police.” Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is also increasing. “Up until now, our worry was about the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Now it is just about executing Palestinians, both by the army and by the settlers,” says Noy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.

As we continue to look at the U.S. and Israel war on Iran and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, we go now to Jerusalem, where we’re joined by Orly Noy. She’s an Iranian Israeli political activist and editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call. She’s also the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. Her new piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Longing for My Tehran.”

Orly, welcome back Democracy Now! If you could talk about this piece you’ve written and why you chose to write it now, “Longing for My Tehran”?

ORLY NOY: Yeah. I mean, as you can imagine, it’s been a very emotional time since the beginning of the war, not just because we are constantly running in and out of shelters, but because this time, the footage of the bombing that I grew accustomed to seeing for over two years from the genocide in Gaza was now coming from my homeland, from my hometown, Tehran, the city where I was born and grew up in. The cries of people were in Farsi this time, which was — which hit, you know, much closer to my heart. And for me as a writer, as someone whose main tools to understand the world are words, I started writing mainly in order to make some sense of this madness, first of all, to myself. And then I was asked to publish something, so I sent this. But this was really an attempt to, you know, bring some sense into this chaos that is now our lives here.

AMY GOODMAN: Orly, you have talked about the majority of Israelis supporting the war at the moment. But there is opposition. Can you talk about the Israeli objective, and at the same time this threat to turn Iran into Gaza and this increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank?

ORLY NOY: Yeah, so, there is — I mean, like every circle of violence that Israel initiates, mostly against Palestinians, there is always a margin of protest and of objection. It’s not small, but it exists. This time, any attempt — the very few attempts to protest against the war were brutally crushed and dispersed the Israeli police, which now became almost entirely — almost like the private militia of the minister for homeland security, the Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir. It is not against the law. It is not illegal to protest. Still it is not illegal to protest in Israel against the war. But trying to please the Kahanist minister, the police very brutally dispersed these protests almost immediately after they began.

In the West Bank, the situation is beyond — I mean, it’s terrifying beyond anything that words can express. You mentioned in your opening the execution of the four members of the Bani Odeh family, including the two parents and two very young kids, in the village of Tammun. We published yesterday a heartbreaking, really disturbing, one of the most disturbing pieces I’ve edited in my entire career as a journalist, where in one of the villages in the north of the Jordan Valley, settlers gathered the entire inhabitants of this Palestinian little village in one tent and tormented them brutally, hit them, severely sexually abused one of the Palestinian men, and all the while forcing the children to watch them as they torture the older members of the community. These things turned almost into daily events. Palestinians are now really — I mean, you know, up until now, our worry was about the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Now it is just about executing Palestinians, both by the army and by the settlers. This is the reality now. They are just executing Palestinians in broad daylight, and nothing is being done about it.

And not without good reason.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3.....r_ahmadi_arian

As the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran extends into a third week, President Trump is demanding other countries send warships to the Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely shut, as oil prices keep rising. This comes as the U.S. and Israel continue to launch major strikes on Iran, while Iran has retaliated by repeatedly striking Israel and U.S. allies in the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. Despite the violence in Iran, “pro-war voices are definitely in the diaspora and very strong, but they also exist inside Iran,” says Naghmeh Sohrabi, professor of Middle East history at Brandeis University.

“I think most Iranians want this war to end as soon as possible, and at the same time, they fear nothing more than the day after the war, if this regime remains intact,” says Iranian American novelist Amir Ahmadi Arian.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: And I’m Amy Goodman in Los Angeles, where I attended the Oscars last night. I had a chance recently to speak with the winners of the documentary feature award, Mr Nobody Against Putin, and we’ll play that later. But first we go to Iran news with three people who were born in Iran. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: As the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran extends into a third week, President Trump is demanding other countries send warships to force open the Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely shut due to threats from Iran. President Trump spoke aboard Air Force One.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territories. It’s the place from which they get their energy. And they should come, and they should help us protect it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Trump told the Financial Times it would be, quote, “very bad for the future of NATO” if allies don’t help secure the critical waterway. In recent weeks, global oil prices have jumped over 40% as Iran has blocked the flow of oil through the strait.

This comes as the U.S. and Israel continue to launch major strikes on Iran, while Iran has retaliated by repeatedly striking Israel and U.S. allies in the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese Red Cross reports Israel’s attacks on Lebanon have now displaced more than 900,000 people. The death toll in Lebanon has topped 850.

We begin now with two guests. Naghmeh Sohrabi is a professor of Middle East history at Brandeis University. Earlier this year, she began translating articles from Persian to English by writers inside the country. Her recent piece for Equator is headlined “Iran’s Fearless Intellectuals.” She’s written extensively on Iranian history and politics and was previously the president of the Association for Iranian Studies.

We’re also joined by professor Amir Ahmadi Arian, an Iranian American novelist and journalist. He left Iran 15 years ago. He’s a creative writing professor at Binghamton University. His most recent piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Of Fire and Rain.”

Welcome, both of you, to Democracy Now! Naghmeh, let’s begin with you. If you could talk about the articles that you’ve been translating since earlier this year and what people in Iran are telling you about the situation on the ground?

NAGHMEH SOHRABI: Thank you for having me.

I started translating these articles after the January brutality and atrocity of the state towards the protesters. So there’s been a whole series of events and articles about that. But specifically about what is going now, there’s been a trickle coming through. But what has really been interesting has been two things. One is the way in which a lot of these writers are articulating how stuck many people are in between a repressive regime and a war. In other words, rather than trying to say they’re either against the Islamic Republic, and therefore pro-war, or against the war, therefore siding on the Islamic Republic, a lot of people have been trying to understand and express what it means to be neither of these two things in a society and in a world which is very, very polarized.

In addition to that, a lot of people have been writing, those who can get it out — and we can talk a little bit later about the communications difficulties — have been writing about what remains after the wars have — after the bombs have stopped — right? — the shockwaves that go through neighborhoods, the everyday life, people going to the store, people having to deal with their children, people having to deal with work. And it’s very important to keep these in mind, because we do have a tendency in times of war to focus on the dead and on the destruction, and we tend to forget that there are people who, after the bombs fall, have to go about some kind of life.

And I’ll just give you a small example of details that come out when we listen to voices on the ground, which is about there being now a glass shortage in Tehran. So, even though these are technically surgical strikes and — they’re hitting buildings, and then the shockwaves are going through the neighborhood and pulling down a wall or shattering constantly glasses. And so, people have had to go and try to, if they — there’s not enough glass to repair these glasses, so people are basically sitting in these half-destroyed homes trying to protect their properties as wind comes and goes through the building. So, the situation becomes a lot more complicated when we listen to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Sohrabi, you write in your piece about how people are feeling completely crushed by two forces, by the pro-war movement in the diaspora of Iranians outside of Iran and the crushing assault of the regime. If you can explain?

NAGHMEH SOHRABI: Yes, I will explain, but I’ll expand what you’re saying to say it’s really important to remember that the pro-war voices are definitely in the diaspora and very strong, but they also exist inside Iran, and they are very strong, though we don’t know majority, not majority. It actually doesn’t matter. And the reason that’s important is because what a lot of people inside Iran have to contend with is the environment in which they’re living in. And what that has done for people who feel they are neither for this war, because of the immense level of destruction that’s taking place in it, nor for the Islamic Republic, because of all the years of repression and brutality that they have had to experience, there’s a sense of isolation that is developing among that segment of the population, a sense of withdrawal. Somebody said to me very recently, “I’ve just stopped talking to anybody. I can’t talk to anyone, because it’s either this one or that one.” And another intellectual that I was speaking to talked about the fact that there’s a sense of despair on top of everything else, because they feel like they failed in trying to get people in their world, in their environment, to understand that despite everything that’s going on in Iran, the war was not going to help them transition out of this government.

The last thing I will say about this is that I’m very interested in ideas that are coming out of Iran. I think we all have a tendency to treat the Middle East, in general, but Iran also, as a cause and not as a generator of ideas. We talk about Iranians or the region when they come out to protest. We talk about them when they’re casualties of war. But they’re also trying to create ideas out of this — what you just talked about, Amy — out of this really intense pressure from multiple sides. And it’s important to keep these ideas at the forefront of our own analysis. In other words, don’t treat the Middle East or Iran just as a cause, but as people who are thinking through and incorporating these thoughts into our own analyses of what’s going on.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, I’d like to bring professor Amir Ahmadi Arian into the conversation, too. In your piece in The New York Review of Books headlined “Of Fire and Rain,” you write that despite being a vocal critic of the Iranian regime, that once the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, you felt towards the country as you do towards your children. If you could elaborate on that?

AMIR AHMADI ARIAN: Yeah, actually it was in reference to the previous war, to the 12-Day War. But yeah, that was something that was like a — almost like a switch in my head, that, you know, when we talk about a country, you know, the metaphor often used is a country as your parent. We use terms like “fatherland,” “motherland.” In Persian, we say madar vatan or sarzamin e pedari. So there is like a parental relationship with one’s homeland. And there’s this expectation that our country protect us, nurture us, prepare us for the future and so on. This is — you know, I think this is an expectation most people on the planet take for granted. You see it in the U.S. all the time. If you talk to Americans, you know, a lot of times you hear about how their country has let them down.

So, I had that relationship with Iran, too. And even though I, you know, grew up during the Iran-Iraq War on the frontline, and my mom was a nurse in frontline hospitals, so in my entire childhood, all the eight years, I lived very close to the frontline of that war, because I was so small, I forgot what the war does, you know, to your relationship to your homeland. And then, last year, when those attacks started, all of a sudden I found this switch. You know, I found this shift in my relationship, in my perspective, that this didn’t look like a parent anymore, you know, someone strong you can rely on, but a child that needs some sort of a protection. And, you know, it felt like I was watching a volatile, fragile being, you know, being sort of battered by a bunch of strangers.

And that’s a feeling that has been intensified over the year. You know, it started with the 12-year war — 12-Day War, then really intensified during the January massacre, you know, in which the Islamic Republic basically declared war on Iranian people and killed tens of thousands of them on the streets of Iran. And now we are in a new phase of that, with another round of bombing and an assault by two armed-to-teeth governments at the same time, while the threat of the Islamic Republic hasn’t abated at all. So, this is, you know, the psychological pressure of that, especially for those of us in diaspora living in the safety, and in our particular case, living in the United States, where, you know, our tax money, a substantial portion of it is going to the U.S. Army — all of these contradictory feelings and, you know, perceptions of reality really takes a toll.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Arian, if you can talk about the impact of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran on the protest movements within Iran, and then also talk about your critique of the Western media coverage, what we’re learning here in the United States?

AMIR AHMADI ARIAN: I think my critique of the Western media coverage is very much, you know, aligned with what Professor Sohrabi just said, that you see it is pretty divided along, you know, like the left and right, at least the American left and right lines. If you look at, you know, the lefties, they are very much focused on an antiwar agenda. They want the bombing to stop and so on. And if you look at the right, they look at — they sort of present this war as a sort of a liberation operation and point out, you know, the regime brutalities over time, and showing that, you know, the damage it has caused have been much more severe than even this intense bombing so far. I mean, this simplification, I think, is understandable, because this is a situation that is very complicated and difficult to grasp.

I think the fact of the matter is that if you live in Iran right now, you’ve got to square two sort of contradictory ideas about the future. I think most Iranians want this war to end as soon as possible, and at the same time, they fear nothing more than the day after the war, if this regime remains intact. So, you know, there’s nothing — I think anyone who has been in a war zone at any point in their lives, I think they know, you know, without a shadow of doubt, that nothing good comes out of any war. You know, there’s no clean war. There’s no clean bombing. Even this, like, precise — so-called precise — attacks on military or government targets in Iran, they cause very severe civilian casualty, you know, the damage to cultural heritage, the environmental effects of that. We just saw what happened in Tehran after they bombed the oil refineries and oil depots. So, I think it’s pretty clear to anyone who knows anything about war that the path to a better society, a more prosperous, a more democratic society, never goes through a war.

And on the other side, the fact is that, you know, the regime in Iran — and I call it “the regime” because it’s been reduced to its, you know, security forces, oppression forces — they have shed all pretenses of governance. So, they are also looking at the Iranian people as their enemy, and they’ve been very clear about that. If you look at the state media, they’re frequently threatening them that if they go out into the street and show any sign of discontent with the state, stage any sort of protest or celebrate the death of Ali Khamenei, which a lot of people did, they’re going to come after them and kill them. I mean, they did that the day after Khamenei died. They shot a bunch of people, and we had casualties. They even shot at the windows of the houses where people were celebrating.

So, you’ve got to be able to square this kind of contradictory situation. You’ve got to find a framework in which both the U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran and the war that the regime in Iran is waging against its own population are included, are incorporated. It’s very difficult, and, honestly, I am not sure if I can do it. But this is the only honest and, you know, sincere take on Iran, which is largely absent from the coverage in the Western media.

As for your first question about the impact of that on the protest movement in Iran, you know, I know from personal experience, even though I was very small, but, you know, that war lasted long enough for me to sort of have a pretty good sense of what it does to a civilian population. When the war ends, it doesn’t end. I mean, it lives with you for the rest of your life. I still have nightmares about the events that I experienced when I was 5 years old. And, you know, a war of that magnitude on a country, that has been so weakened and so brutalized by the state, by the sanctions, and so on and so forth — it’s a long story — the exhaustion that it will cause, the sense of draining and despair that it will cause — it has caused already, after two weeks — is, you know, so profound and so paralyzing. Then, the expectation that people come out of this war and organize a political movement to start even think about doing anything that will lead to a meaningful change in the political status quo, it’s a fantasy.

You know, right now, as soon as the bombs start to fall, people’s survival instinct kick in. They look for shelter. They look for water and food. They want to protect their family, especially their kids. And they’re going to stay in the survival mode as long as the war goes on. And after the bombing stops, which, you know, none of us knows when that will happen, it takes months to kind of process this situation, to kind of live with this trauma or incorporate that trauma into their life and even start thinking about doing sort of anything else, to organizing your going out or, you know, participating in any kind of political process.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news.....-iran-war-news

Trump lackey Brendan Carr is once again threatening to pull licences from broadcasters for spreading "Fake news" about Iran. (Read "Telling uncomfortable truths")

He even appeared to get in a dig at the Electronic Freedum Foundation.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3...../jeffrey_sachs

Yet another sign of America's creeping lies and fascism.Sachs speaks the ACTUAL truth here.


The global economy has been rocked by the war in the Middle East, with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatening energy flows and sending the price of oil soaring to its highest level in years. The United Nations Security Council responded to the unprovoked U.S.-Israeli war by passing a resolution this week condemning Iran — specifically for its attacks on U.S. allies in the region — while ignoring the role of the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government in instigating the bloodshed. Economist Jeffrey Sachs joins Democracy Now! to discuss the fallout of the “war of choice” and why it also constitutes an assault on the United Nations.

“This is so out of control, without any logic, any rationality, not any humane, moral, legal justification whatsoever,” says Sachs. “It will lead to world war the way we’re going, because we have two malignant narcissists, Netanyahu and Trump, that are leading us to disaster.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in Los Angeles, headed to Mexico City to Cineteca Nacional tonight, where they’re showing the film about Democracy Now!, Steal This Story, Please! I hope to see folks there, and tomorrow, also part of the Ambulante Film Festival. Check our website at democracynow.org. And we’re joined by Democracy Now!’s Juan González in Chicago.

Earlier this week, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution condemning Iran for its, quote, “egregious attacks” against its Gulf neighbors, calling out specifically attacks on residential areas and civilians, as well as its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, threatening global energy supplies. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan are specifically mentioned in the resolution, which had 140 co-sponsors. Of the 15 Security Council members, 13 voted in favor, with none against; China and Russia abstained. Bahrain’s U.N. Ambassador Jamal Fares Alrowaiei said the vote reflected the collective conscience of the world.

JAMAL FARES ALROWAIEI: [translated] This overwhelming support from the international community reflects a collective awareness of the danger posed by the unjust Iranian attack against our countries, the Kingdom of Bahrain, the GCC and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, over the past 12 days. … The adoption by the council of this resolution today confirms that the international community is united in addressing and confronting these hostile acts. The stability and safety of the region is part and parcel of the security and peace architecture.

AMY GOODMAN: Russia’s representative to the U.N. called the passed resolution biased for not acknowledging Israel and the United States as instigators of the war. Russia introduced a second resolution that called for an immediate halt to all hostilities in the Middle East, without naming any parties involved. That resolution failed to pass. This is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz.

MIKE WALTZ: Once again, Russia is acting here at the Security Council to protect its partner, Iran. We reject Russia’s attempt to conflate lawful U.S. actions, taken in line with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter — to conflate those actions with Iran’s pattern of bloodshed and brutality to its own people and around the world and with its recent deliberate and at-scale targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf and the Middle East. The United States will continue to work, here at this council and beyond, to hold the Iranian regime to account and to bring to light its destabilizing and unlawful actions. Russia’s attempts to prevent this council from acting in line with its core principles will not deter us.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. He’s the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He’s also served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. He recently wrote an article headlined “This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations,” unquote.

In an open letter to the U.N. Security Council in February, Professor Sachs said it was the U.S., and not Iran, that had walked away from negotiations and that U.S. threats against Iran violated international law. He said, quote, “The issue facing the UN Security Council in these perilous days is whether any member state, by force or threat of force, may place itself above the United Nations Charter that governs us all. At stake is the integrity of the UN-based international system,” unquote. Professor Sachs today joins us from Rome, Italy.

Thanks so much for being with us, Professor Sachs. Why don’t you elaborate on this letter and your statements about the U.N. international order and what is happening today with the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran and Iran’s retaliatory attacks?

JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you very much, Amy. And what a chilling show to hear Gideon Levy, to hear your report from Beirut.

We have a war of blatant aggression that is going to put the entire world into a disaster. This is a war of aggression and a war of choice by Israel and the United States. It is in the most blatant, frank violation of the U.N. Charter and the core of the U.N. Charter, its purpose, which says that nations “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” period. That is Article 2, paragraph 4, of the U.N. Charter.

Waltz, the U.S. ambassador, says, “Oh, we’re acting under Article 51.” That is the article on self-defense. The United States is not acting in self-defense. Israel is not acting in self-defense. These two countries are committing flagrant aggression. And they’ve done it twice now in the context of negotiations, which makes it all the more pernicious. Twice the United States claimed it was negotiating with Iran, and twice it killed Iranian leaders in the midst of the so-called negotiations. This is the most blatant and brazen assault on U.N., the U.N. Charter and international law since it was founded in 1945. Even in the Iraq War and other U.S. war — and Israeli wars of choice, they faked it at least. Here, they don’t even fake it. They just are blatant aggressors with no justification at all.

Our U.N. ambassador is Green Beret. They have militarized everything about our society, Amy and Juan. We are in a security state, not a constitutional order. No one asked the American people about whether to go to war or not, and our Congress doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. So, when they’re asked, they say, “Don’t ask us. This is — we give it to Mr. Trump and to Mr. Netanyahu.”

So, I think this is the most brazen fascism that we have seen since the fascist era. And it is absolutely extraordinary, and it’s going to put us, I think, probably into World War III. And if it doesn’t do that, it’s going to put us into an economic calamity worldwide.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jeffrey Sachs, I wanted to ask you — this narrative now that the Trump administration has been pushing in all of their pronouncements, that this is actually — this is actually attempting to end the war that Iran launched against the United States decades ago. And they make it seem like everything that’s happened has been around aggressing against the United States, forgetting, obviously, the role of our country in goading and supplying Iraq in its war against Iran in the 1980s and the various other attacks by Israel and the United States against Iran in the past.

JEFFREY SACHS: Look, every word that Donald Trump says is vile and ignorant. So, we can almost say for sure that every word he posts every day is a vile lie.

But when it comes to the United States and Iran, yes, this does go back a long way. In 1953, when Iran had a fully functioning democracy, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the government of Mosaddegh, Prime Minister Mosaddegh. We installed a police state. We installed a police state that lasted from 1953 to 1979. When the Iranian people took back their country, we immediately armed Iraq, as you said, Juan, to go to war with Iran and to kill hundreds of thousands of people. When that war ended in 1988, the United States continued, through the CIA and other means, to do everything possible to destabilize the Iranian government, to crush the economy, to impose U.S. measures, sanctions and so on, to destroy the well-being of the population.

When the Iranians said, “We want to negotiate with you,” the United States rejected at almost every stage, with one exception, which is that in the Obama presidency, the United States, together with Britain, France, China, Russia, Germany, the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, the P5+1, as it was called, negotiated an agreement with Iran that put Iran under strict U.N. supervision, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to ensure that what Iran said was actually carried out, which is that Iran did not want a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA would inspect. And for three years, the IAEA inspected hundreds and hundreds of times, and Iran was in full compliance. And then what happened? Netanyahu and Trump ripped up the agreement and went back to war, a hybrid war with Iran.

Everything Trump says, which is despicable, because he is absolutely leading us to ruin and leading the world to World War III — everything he says is a lie, because he says, “I’m stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.” What he has done is rip up the agreement that already existed to ensure that; kill, assassinate Iranian leaders repeatedly; kill the Iranian religious leader, who for decades had said that a nuclear weapon would be against Islamic law, kill that person; invade or bomb the country with carpet bombing now; and is presiding over what is now already a regional war, with Israel behaving, as usual, in its completely fascistic way of genocide in Gaza, locking up the West Bank, as Gideon Levy just told us, and invading Lebanon and displacing already a million people, bombing the universities, bombing the hospitals, bombing the schools.

This is so out of control, without any logic, any rationality, even not any humane, moral, legal justification whatsoever. We have not seen anything like this since the fascists of World War II. And it is extraordinarily dangerous, what’s happening. It will lead to world war, the way we’re going, because we have two malignant narcissists, Netanyahu and Trump, that are leading us to disaster.

And you listen to Netanyahu’s words. He explains this has nothing to do with the U.N. Charter. He says, “We’re not waiting. We are initiating.” Well, that, Mr. Netanyahu is against the U.N. Charter. You’re not allowed to initiate war under the U.N. Charter. You’ve explained it very clearly. You are making a war of aggression. And you, too, Mr. Trump, you are making a war of aggression, and you’re threatening the entire world. It’s really as simple as that.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Sachs, we have less than a minute. President Trump yesterday suggested skyrocketing fuel costs are a good thing. You’re an economist. Trump wrote, “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” This contradicted what he said at the State of the Union, saying oil prices were lower than under President Biden, and he was very proud of that. Thirty seconds. Your response?

JEFFREY SACHS: He may put money into the hands of a few oil companies which pay his bills, which are corrupt, which pay his campaigns, but he’s going to impoverish Americans, and he’s throwing the entire world into a profound economic crisis. And the world is going to remember, and it’s going to know very soon. Israel and the United States have put the entire world into a profound economic crisis. Again, the first thing you know, anything Trump writes is a combination of ignorance, malevolence and lies, including that statement, Amy.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3.....srael_huffpost

On the first day of the US Israeli attack on Iran over 175 primary and secondary schoolgirls plus a handful of adults were murdered at the girls' school in Minab.

This was originally thought to have been done by Israel, but it turns out to have been a US operation done with Tomahawk missiles. The US are the only ones in the area with such missiles.

When this was mentioned to Trump, he claimed that Iran had these missiles as well, and that they were common. He then went on to claim that Iran used this Missile on itself, which is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. He lied and repeatedly changed his story about this, much like the way he and Hegseth have changed their stories about why we're involved in this war about twice a day.

REPORTER: Tomahawk missile likely destroyed that Iranian girls’ school. So, will the Americans, will the U.S. accept any responsibility for that strike?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I haven’t seen it. And I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is used by — you know, is sold and used by other countries. You know that. And whether it’s Iran, who also has some Tomahawks — I wish they had more. But whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk — a Tomahawk is very generic. It’s sold to other countries. But that’s being investigated right now.

SHAWN McCREESH: Mr. President, you just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war, but you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us. But I will certainly — whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.

Hegseth claims that this incident is under investigation, but he cut the Pentagon departmat responsible for that by 90% and lawyers who investigated such incidents were fired when he first took office.

This was also reported to be a double-tap strike, where the first strike was followed by another, after parents and others showed up after calls later. This has not yet been confirmed, though.

It appears that The Pentagon was operating on information that was outdated by years, which may have been obtained through Antghropic and Palantir. It turns out that the school the school is next door to the actual target, and this incident was entirely avoidable, had anyone actually checked more recent records.

Hegseth said:

"B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be."
-Really, Pete?

Israel and the US are the real terrorists here, with their illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran. They're the true axis of evil here.

To be celebrated at 1:59:26.

I'm back, bitches!

And I'll be back on my isht tomorrow...

It's at least possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMrZQ9euGF8

Iran has denied that they attacked Saudi Arabia,The UAE. And Cyprus. They've owned up to their other strikes.

I wouldn't necessarily Trust Iran's word, but israel has very gopd reasons to do this. European states are now saying that they''re planning to get involved on Israel's side, despite the British Defense Minister saying that the rocket that hit Cyprus wasn't launche from Iran.

Trump has lied about Spain promising to get involved on Israel and the US's side.

Israel would also clearly love for Saudi Arabia and the UAE get involved on their side as well.

I guess we'll see.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3.....eland_security

risti Noem has been ousted from her position as homeland security secretary after intensifying calls for her resignation. Noem’s tenure has been marked by allegations of corruption, deadly immigration raids and legal challenges. ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott has reported extensively on Noem’s tenure, including a $200 million ad campaign that may have been the inciting incident for her firing. “This did not go through the normal competitive process,” says Elliott. Instead, the ad “went to a Delaware LLC that was formed only a few days before.”

President Trump has announced Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma as the new homeland security secretary. Mullin “has been known as a hard-liner,” says Chris Stein, senior politics reporter for The Guardian US. Stein adds that the Trump administration will continue its aggressive immigration policies despite the change in leadership.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn to Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, President Trump fired Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security. He announced the decision on social media and said Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma would take over. Noem has been facing intensifying calls to resign or be impeached over her disastrous handling of Trump’s immigration raids nationwide.

She was grilled by lawmakers earlier this week at a series of hearings on Capitol Hill. This is Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina questioning Noem about the shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

SEN. THOM TILLIS: The fact that you can’t admit to a mistake, which looks like under investigation is going to prove that Miss Good and Mr. Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back. Law enforcement needs to learn from that. You don’t protect them by not looking after the facts. Not only should the FBI be investigating it, but every single law enforcement agency in that jurisdiction should be invited to it, so our law enforcement officers do not have this pall cast upon them.

AMY GOODMAN: Noem was also widely accused of corruption. In one instance, she oversaw a self-promotional Department of Homeland Security advertising campaign that cost $220 million. The no-bid contract was awarded to a newly formed limited liability company, which then subcontracted with The Strategy Group, a company whose CEO, Ben Yoho, is married to Noem’s former assistant secretary at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, who just left. This is Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: You’re testifying that President Trump approved this ahead of time? Is that my understanding?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: We had conversations about making sure that we were telling people —

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: No, ma’am. I’m asking you — sorry to interrupt, but the president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently. President —

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: Yes, sir, we went through the legal processes, did it correctly, worked with OMB.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: Did the president know you were going to do this?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: Yes.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: He did?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: Mm-hmm, yes.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: OK.
-So she lied about that under oath,

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump said in an interview with Reuters he had not signed off on the spending.

While Noem is being removed as DHS secretary, President Trump said she’ll stay in the administration in a newly created role, special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, an initiative Trump said would be formally announced this weekend in a summit in Miami. We’ll talk more about that later in the broadcast.

But first, for more on Noem’s ouster and her replacement, we’re joined by two guests. Chris Stein is the senior politics reporter for The Guardian US, his most recent piece headlined “Trump fires homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.” He’s joining us from Washington, D.C. In New York, Justin Elliott, reporter for ProPublica, co-author of several investigative reports on Kristi Noem, including the most recent, “Kristi Noem Misled Congress About Top Aide’s Role in DHS Contracts.”

Lay out, Justin, if you will, the corruption allegations against Noem. And again, she has not been entirely removed from the Trump administration, just moved to a different role at this point.

JUSTIN ELLIOTT: Yeah, I mean, the precipitating event that led to her firing was that exchange you played with the Republican Senator Kennedy from Louisiana about this ad campaign. And this ad campaign’s been going on, actually, for — you know, since the very beginning of the Trump administration, as you said, $220 million of taxpayer money for these ads, some of which featured Noem on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore. And, you know, this did not go through the normal competitive process, went to a Delaware LLC that was formed only a few days before, before getting this absolutely massive contract. We reported that one of the subcontractors, as you mentioned, was a Republican media firm run by the husband of the former — now former DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin. You know, it turned out they actually got a relatively small amount of money, but more money went to a couple of other Republican media firms that handled the ad buying for President Trump’s campaign.

And I will say that, you know, in sort of partial defense of Noem on this, if President Trump or the White House had a problem with this ad campaign, you know, this was no secret. It was announced by press release a year ago. The ads were literally running on Fox & Friends, which President Trump watches. President Trump is featured in the ads, not just Kristi Noem. They look like sort of campaign-style ads promoting both Noem and Trump. So, I will say the official story here about the White House being upset about these ads is a little bit peculiar.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Justin, could you also talk about, in the hearings that were held, the focus also on the role of Corey Lewandowski as a special government employee under Kristi Noem?

JUSTIN ELLIOTT: Absolutely. So, people may remember Lewandowski. He was the Trump campaign manager way back in 2016. He was occupying this, I think, unprecedented role where he was technically a volunteer, not drawing a government salary, but was effectively co-running the department alongside Noem. What that means is that he’s actually permitted to have some types of outside income, unlike any other normal government official.

So, one of the major unanswered — still unanswered questions is: Who was paying Lewandowski? How was he paying the rent? Was he being paid by companies, lobbying firms, at the same time that he was, you know, essentially, co-running one of those powerful agencies in the government? By the way, we’re still reporting on that. Please get in touch with me if anyone out there has information about it.

But Noem was asked about this at the hearing, and she denied that he has a role in approving contracts. We reported, based on documents that we obtained, that he was literally signing off on contracts. So, that was not a correct, you know, description of what his actual role has been at DHS.
-Crooked from topn to bottom.

AMY GOODMAN: Not only signing off on contracts, as you pointed out, but was in her office firing people. And, of course, there was a number of questions by the senators and the congressmembers — there were two days of hearings — about her having an affair with someone who was supposedly reporting to her, though she ultimately said, no, he is reporting to President Trump.

I wanted to bring Chris Stein into this conversation, the senior politics reporter for The Guardian US. The question is, as you report on Noem’s ouster and now the Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin being — Trump saying that — nominating him for this position in the Cabinet: Isn’t she just the face of the immigration policies of the Trump administration crafted by Trump and Stephen Miller, Stephen Miller the architect of them? Talk about Markwayne Mullin and his stance on immigration. I mean, a lot of issues were raised about her calling the U.S. citizens who were killed by immigration agents “domestic terrorists” before there was any kind of investigation or even evidence of this. I wanted to turn first to Jamie Raskin of Maryland questioning Noem over those statements.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Based on what you know today, Madam Secretary, were Renee Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: Congressman, what happened in Minnesota in those two incidents was an absolute tragedy. And I offered my condolences —

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Were they domestic terrorists, as you said to the country?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: — offered my condolences to their families, because I know that their lives will never be the same after that happened. What I would —

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Is that an apology for what you said?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: We, in those instances, offer as much information as we can from officers and agents on the ground in a chaotic scene that gets relayed to us —

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: I’ll repeat my question.

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: — so that we can communicate [inaudible] —

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Reclaiming my time. Based on what you know today — Madam Secretary, based on what you know today, were Renee Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: As you know, there’s ongoing investigations that are being led by the FBI.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Oh, but you didn’t wait for the investigation, did you? You didn’t wait for the evidence. You proclaimed that they were domestic terrorists at the time.
-Another question she completely dodged.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Chris Stein, if you can comment on this interaction, but also what Markwayne Mullin brings to this, the senator now nominated to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security?

CHRIS STEIN: Well, what you just said, you know, regarding how Noem was the face of immigration policy that really came from Stephen Miller at the White House, and, of course, it was approved by Donald Trump, is exactly what top Democrats said, you know, right after the ouster of Noem was announced and Markwayne Mullin was announced as her replacement. You know, they have their own set of demands for the Department of Homeland Security. And, you know, they basically said that, “No matter who leads it, we’re going to continue pursuing these demands.”

You know, the person that has been chosen, Senator Mullin from Oklahoma, is someone who, when I encounter him at the Capitol, you know, I know he’s going to kind of defend the president on the issue of the day. He’s not a senator known for opposing President Trump or getting ahead of him or, you know, having daylight between him in any way. And when it comes to the issue of immigration, he has been known as a hard-liner, you know, has come forward making statements about ways in which he believes people who are here without documentation can be cracked down on or encouraged to leave, or things that are happening in the immigration system that he thinks needs to be fixed. So, he clearly has thoughts on this subject. He’s not someone who the president has ever, you know, trouble with. He often talks to the press. He’s out and about saying these things. So, in that way, he is, you know, kind of an ideal pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, from the president’s perspective
-Mullin has also maintaned that "We're not at war with Iran. Huh?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chris, what about Mullin’s own previous business activities and the potential conflicts of interest as the new secretary of homeland security?

CHRIS STEIN: He ran a plumbing business prior to winning election to the House of Representatives in 2012. He was also an MMA fighter. You know, he’s been in politics now for about 15 years. You know, I don’t think he necessarily has the same sorts of entanglements that we saw with Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski. At least we don’t know of anything like that yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Back in November 2023 during a Senate hearing, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin challenged Teamster Sean O’Brien to a fight, with Committee Chair Senator Bernie Sanders stepping in to defuse the situation as Mullin got up from his seat to confront O’Brien.

SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN: You want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here.

SEAN O’BRIEN: OK, that’s fine, perfect.

SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN: You want to do it now?

SEAN O’BRIEN: I’d love to do it right now.

SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN: Well, stand your butt up then.

SEAN O’BRIEN: You stand your butt up, big guy.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Oh, hold up. No. Stop it. All right, hold it.

SEAN O’BRIEN: Is that your solution to every problem?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Oh no, sit down. Sit down.

SEAN O’BRIEN: That’s why you’re a clown. Look at you.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: No, no, you’re a United States senator.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Stein?

CHRIS STEIN: When I think about that clip, it was obviously, you know, pretty eyebrow-raising at the time, quite a thing to have happen in the middle of a Senate committee hearing. But then the Teamsters went on to, you know, not endorse in the 2024 election, even when in the past they endorsed Democrats. You know, that certainly isn’t the reason why Kamala Harris lost. But, you know, you saw Sean O’Brien and speak at the Republican National Convention, but not the Democratic National Convention. So, for all the fireworks there, at the end of the day, they ended up actually helping out Senator Mullin’s side much more than they did the Democrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-ma2kX7sDs&t=5s

Another great song from Emma's Revolution. (Named for noted Anarchist and socialist Emma Goldman)

Check out their page for other great songs, often performed on the streets.

The movie about minneapolis and ICE is sure gonna have a dope Sounddtrack.





soundtrack.

This is breaking news. Trump has heard us,

No plan, no strategy, no common sense. He's once again getting us involved in a war with zero endgame. This won't be a twelve day war.


https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3....._state_defense

As the U.S. and Israel continue their bombardment of Iran and the conflict spreads throughout the region, we speak with two former U.S. government officials with experience in Middle East policy. Hala Rharrit is a career diplomat who resigned from the State Department in 2024 to protest the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, and Jasmine El-Gamal served as a Middle East adviser at the Pentagon during the Obama administration.

“This is exactly what American diplomats have been trying to avoid for two decades. And before my resignation, it is exactly what I was warning against,” says Rharrit, now in Oman after leaving Dubai with her family for safety.

El-Gamal casts doubt on the Trump administration’s shifting reasons for the war, including President Trump’s “feeling” that Iran was about to strike first. “It is ludicrous to expect the American people to believe that Iran would have attacked the U.S. preemptively in the middle of negotiations,” she says, adding that the contradictory messages show “how little they were really thinking this through before they went to war.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran have entered a sixth day as the war spreads beyond the Middle East. In Iran, the U.S.-Israeli attacks have reportedly killed more than 1,230 people. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the U.S. and Israel have struck at least 174 cities in Iran since Saturday. Iranian officials have accused the U.S. and Israel of intentionally striking civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and sports stadiums.

Iran is continuing to retaliate across the Gulf. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims it’s inflicted significant damage on 20 U.S. military targets in Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE. Iran has been accused of firing drones and missiles at Azerbaijan and Turkey, but Iran denies both claims. On Wednesday, NATO air defenses shot down a ballistic missile headed into Turkish airspace. Earlier today, Iran’s IRGC took credit for attacking a U.S. oil tanker in the Persian Gulf.

This comes a day after a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian naval vessel off the coast of Sri Lanka, killing at least 87 people. The ship had been returning from India, where it took part in a major international naval exercise called Milan 2026. The U.S. had been invited to take part in the same exercise but pulled out. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the U.S. Navy of committing an atrocity at sea. He said on social media, quote, “Mark my words: The U.S. will come to bitterly regret [the] precedent it has set,” unquote.

Meanwhile, the death toll from Israel’s attacks on Lebanon has reached 77. More than 300,000 people have evacuated southern Lebanon.

Earlier today, the Pentagon revealed the final two names of the six U.S. soldiers killed in an Iranian attack in Kuwait. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized how the news media has reported on U.S. troop deaths.

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground. We control their fate. But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad. But try, for once, to report the reality.

AMY GOODMAN: CNN’s Kaitlan Collins later questioned White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about Hegseth’s remarks.

KAITLAN COLLINS: The president is going to attend the dignified transfer for these families. Given what Secretary Hegseth said this morning, is it the position of this administration that the press should not prominently cover the deaths of U.S. service members?

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: No, it’s the position of this administration that the press in this room and the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury and the damage it is doing to the rogue Iranian regime that has threatened the lives of every single American in this room.

KAITLAN COLLINS: Hegseth was complaining that it was front-page news about these six service members who were killed.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: That’s not what the secretary said, Kaitlan, and that’s not what the secretary meant, and you know it.

KAITLAN COLLINS: I can produce quotes.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: You know you are being disingenuous. There is not — we’ve never had a secretary of defense who cares more —

KAITLAN COLLINS: He said, “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad.”

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: Yeah, the press does —

KAITLAN COLLINS: As you know, we cover the deaths of U.S. service members under every president.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: The press does only want to make the president look bad. That’s a — that’s a fact, especially you. No, listen to me, especially you and especially CNN. And the secretary of defense cares deeply about our war fighters and our men and women in uniform.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as the Republican-led Senate rejected a resolution aimed to force President Trump to end the war in Iran, which was launched without congressional approval. Democratic Senator John Fetterman joined Republicans to oppose the war powers resolution. Republican Senator Rand Paul was the sole Republican to vote to curtail Trump’s war powers. The House is scheduled to vote on a similar resolution today.

We’re joined now by two former U.S. government officials with long histories working on Mideast policy. Jasmine El-Gamal is the founder and CEO of Averos Strategies, foreign policy analyst and former Middle East adviser at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. She’s joining us from London. Also with us, Hala Rharrit. She’s an 18-year career diplomat who resigned from the State Department over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. She was the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign. She had served as Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department. Rharrit is now an IMEU Policy Project nonresident fellow, joining us from Muscat, Oman, after evacuating from Dubai.

Let’s begin with you there, Hala Rharrit. Explain what happened, why you have evacuated your family to Oman. And respond to what the U.S. has been doing over the last six days. We have entered the six-day mark for the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, and then Iran retaliating throughout the Gulf.

HALA RHARRIT: Amy, it’s such a pleasure to be back with you. I wish it was under better circumstances.

But, yes, like the rest of the world, I woke up on Saturday morning to the horrific news that the United States and Israel had attacked Iran. And I had the most sinking feeling, because this is exactly what American diplomats have been trying to avoid for two decades. And before my resignation, it is exactly what I was warning against and what I was trying to alleviate and was trying to stop. And it was just a horrific feeling, knowing that the day had come and that this would absolutely not end well.

When it comes to my family, I live in Dubai, as you mentioned, and I knew that the retaliation would come quickly. And so, as a mother, I went into action mode as to what we needed to do to keep our family safe. Now, it did not take very long for the strikes to begin, and we could hear them very loudly in Dubai, unfortunately. My kids were very frightened. We could hear the fighter jets, and we could also hear the interceptions. Now, luckily for the civilian population in Dubai, there’s a robust missile defense system provided by the United States, unlike — and I have to stress — the civilian population in Gaza, that did not have the luxury of having a missile defense system or any type of defense system. So we were relatively safe. But for the sake of my children, we slept — we did not sleep. We had a sleepless night on Saturday, because the noises were scaring them, and also we were getting these automatic updates. Whether your phone is on silent, the government was pushing out these very scary-sounding eeeh, that was really, really frightening to my kids. We were all in one — in my bedroom.

And after that, we knew, my husband and I understood, and I understood deeply as an American diplomat, that this situation would only escalate. So we decided on Sunday morning; as soon as we woke up, we hit the road to Oman. And I have been here since. Now we’re in a bit of limbo, along with a lot of other American citizens, because the airspace is heavily restricted, and it’s very hard to get air flights out. So, for the time being, we’re here and trying to figure out our next steps.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there were indirect U.S.-Iran talks going on in Geneva that were facilitated by Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Albusaidi, key mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks. This was the foreign minister speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation this weekend.

BADR ALBUSAIDI: The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb. This is, I think, a big achievement. This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama’s time. This is something completely new. It really makes the enrichment argument less relevant, because now we are talking about zero stockpiling. And that is very, very important, because if you cannot stockpile material that is enriched, then there is no way you can actually create a bomb, whether you enrich or don’t enrich. And I think this is really something that has been missed a lot by the media, and I want to clarify that from the standpoint of a mediator.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s really interesting, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, the key mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks. He flew from Geneva to Washington, D.C., apparently, word has it, to be able to directly convey to the president through the media to make sure that he was not only getting — the president was not only getting the Witkoff-Jared Kushner version of the talks, but also to say, “You have a better deal than President Obama got back in 2015.” I wanted to bring Jasmine El-Gamal into this conversation, former Middle East adviser to the Pentagon during Obama’s administration. Your response to what has taken place?

JASMINE EL-GAMAL: Well, first of all, thank you so much, Amy, for having me on. I’m a big fan of the show, and it’s really good to see Hala, as well.

I think, you know, there are really two big questions that any U.S. administration should have the answer to before it goes to war. One is: Why are we going to war? Is this necessary? Have all other avenues been exhausted? That’s one set of questions. And, of course, the other one is: What are our objectives? Are they achievable? And what is our exit strategy? That’s the second bucket of questions. And neither of those two buckets of questions have been adequately answered by the U.S. administration, by any official, whether it’s Pete Hegseth at the Defense Department, Secretary Rubio or the president himself.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about the Trump administration’s shifting rationales for why the U.S. attacked Iran amidst ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. So, this is Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking Monday.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties, and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, Rubio backtracked and said the decision to strike came from President Trump, not Israel. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary [Karoline] Leavitt said Trump had a, quote, “good feeling” Iran would attack.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: I think the president, prior to that phone call, had a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike United States assets and our personnel in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Jasmine El-Gamal, as a former Pentagon official, your characterization of these shifting reasons that the U.S. has attacked Iran?

JASMINE EL-GAMAL: I mean, it obviously shows you that there was no clear plan and no well-thought-out strategy before the U.S. entered into this war. Now, I don’t want to remove all agency from President Trump. After all, he is the one who gave the order at the end. But we do know, from extensive reporting from Hala and I — I’m sure she can agree — from our time in government, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been for decades trying to drag the U.S. into war with Iran. Senator Van Hollen yesterday said he just hadn’t found a president stupid enough to be dragged into that war.

So, he was under — we know that President Trump was under heavy pressure from Prime Minister Netanyahu to strike Iran while it was down, while it was weak. The way that the Israeli prime minister — and certainly this is true — describe Iran today is probably at its weakest point from a security and defense perspective, from the perspective of its proxies, and from an economic and internal domestic perspective, as well. So, the idea here for those who are pushing for war with Iran was that it was now or never, it was really the right time to do so.

Now, Amy, that doesn’t mean that there was an imminent threat from Iran to the United States, which is what the U.S. needs to have a proper legal basis for this war. Intelligence assessments do not agree with the president’s characterization that Iran was about to strike first. And I can tell you, having worked at the Pentagon, that it is ludicrous to expect the American people to believe that Iran would have attacked the U.S. preemptively in the middle of negotiations, especially when, as you said, according to the Omani foreign minister who was mediating, that Iran was actually trying to make some kind of progress in these talks.

And I think, lastly, it’s just important to separate two things here, which can be true at the same time. One is that this Iranian regime was a brutal, oppressive regime, and, second, that it is not a legal justification to go to war to have the president talk about his “feeling” that Iran was going to strike. And we have seen the administration, every day since then, retroactively try to provide a series of justifications and objectives for this war. And the fact that they’re doing so now, after the fact, tells you a lot about how little they were really thinking this through before they actually went to war.

AMY GOODMAN: Hala Rharrit, you’re an 18-year career diplomat. You resigned over the U.S.'s Gaza policy under President Biden, the first diplomat to publicly resign over the U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. If you can talk about the through-line from there to here — while you say that you were shocked Saturday morning, you weren't actually surprised — and what this means in terms of a wider conflict, the massive Israeli assault right now on Lebanon, with tens of thousands of Lebanese fleeing, Syrian refugees who have lived in Lebanon now crossing back over the border into Syria, terrified about what’s happening in Lebanon? Take it from there.

HALA RHARRIT: Absolutely. No, I was horrified by what was happening, but I was not at all surprised. This is what I was warning against. This is what multiple diplomats were warning against and what we were working and trying to avoid.

Now, if you rewind back to 2023 and 2024, you’ll remember that there was a lot of activity, even then, with the Iranians. Israel attacked Iran and killed Iranian commanders in Syria. Three service members in Jordan were killed, as well, by an Iranian-backed group. All of this was a lead-up that was dragging the United States into a direct conflict with Iran. And as an American diplomat, my role was to protect and defend the United States of America. And so, our warnings were “pull back, pull back.” But Netanyahu obviously had other plans.

Now, we insisted — we insisted that U.S. law would actually be followed, meaning you cannot continue to surge unconditional weapons to the state of Israel. We knew, and we were documenting, and I even reported this to Congress after my resignation, that these weapons were not being stockpiled by Israel. The weapons that we were sending to Israel were not only being used for the genocide in Gaza, but that they were going to be used for a regional conflict with Iran, which would have the proportions to bring down, really, the entire region. I don’t think we can underestimate what is actually happening now.

So, for Netanyahu, there is not two policies. It is not Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon. It is one in the same.

AMY GOODMAN: I —

HALA RHARRIT: For the state of Israel — sorry, go on.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation saying it’s been inundated with over 200 calls from members of the U.S. military regarding religious comments made by U.S. commanders about the war in Iran. One combat unit commander reportedly said the war is, quote, “part of God’s divine plan,” and that, quote, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” unquote. Last month, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, or, as Trump calls him, the war secretary, invited the controversial Christian nationalist Pastor Doug Wilson to lead the Pentagon’s prayer service. Wilson has opposed Muslims holding public office, does not believe women should be allowed to vote. Jasmine El-Gamal, you’re a former Pentagon official. Your response to how this is being framed and the danger of this, what’s seen as a Christian crusade by some?

JASMINE EL-GAMAL: Look, I mean, obviously, it’s horrifying to hear those remarks, and there certainly has been in this second Trump administration that surge of Christian nationalism, of Christian Zionism, into U.S. policymaking when it comes to the Middle East. And it is absolutely horrifying, because it means that we are sending American soldiers, U.S., using American taxpayer money, to a region that has been ravaged over the years by successive ill-thought-out U.S. interventions. The human cost of America’s wars in the Middle East has been devastating. In just the last five days, as you mentioned earlier, almost 1,200 people killed and injured, tens of thousands displaced. The human cost is not something to be taken lightly here. And the recklessness and the callousness of these decisions that are being made by a handful of men, essentially, that are — that are upending the region, you know, and the global economy, as well, especially if it continues much, much further, is extremely irresponsible, and extremely dangerous.



JASMINE EL-GAMAL: — and extremely dangerous.

Yet more Christian Zionist shit from top members of our government.

Bet it felt real good for him to feel Jeebus smearing those unguents all over his revolting body.


https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3.....ge_war_on_iran

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has been inundated with over 200 calls from members of the U.S. military regarding religious comments made by U.S. commanders about the war in Iran. One combat unit commander reportedly said that the war is “part of God’s divine plan” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited the controversial Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson to lead the Pentagon’s prayer service. Wilson has opposed Muslims holding public office and does not believe women should be allowed to vote.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/4/nilo_tabrizy

After a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killed at least 175 people, nearly all young schoolchildren, online reports spread disinformation about the attack, including claims that the Iranian government itself had bombed the school. Journalist Nilo Tabrizy describes how outside reporters have been able to verify the attack despite Iran’s internet blackout and says attempts are still being made to confirm whether the strike is attributable to the U.S. or to Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: It happened early Saturday morning. One of the first strikes of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran hit a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran. The death toll is now at least 175, most of them primary school girls. On Tuesday, thousands of people filled the streets of Minab for a mass funeral. The girls’ ages range from 7 to 12. Iran’s school week runs from Saturday to Thursday. When the missile hit the school on Saturday morning, the girls were in their morning session. After the strike, parents searched for their children among the dead.

PARENT: [translated] This is her math book, Mohanna Zari, first grade. This is her folder with her schoolwork, her homework here. What wrong has she done? Her color pencil box is still in her bag.

AMY GOODMAN: While Iran blamed Israel for the attack, neither Israel nor the United States has taken responsibility for the bombing. On Tuesday, the United Nations Human Rights Office urged the forces behind the attack on the girls’ school to investigate.

RAVINA SHAMDASANI: In Iran, the Iran Red Crescent Society reports put the death toll at 787. In the single deadliest and devastating incident, dozens of girls were reportedly killed and injured when their primary school in Minab in the south of the country was struck during the school day. The high commissioner calls for a prompt, impartial and thorough investigation into the circumstances of the attack. The onus is on the forces that carried out the attack to investigate it. We call on them to make public the findings and to ensure accountability and redress for the victims.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by investigative reporter Nilo Tabrizy. She’s worked extensively with open-source material to report on Iran for The Washington Post and The New York Times. She’s been tracking what she calls the information wars online over the school bombing. Her recent piece for New Lines Magazine is headlined “Investigation Debunks Claims IRGC Bombed Iranian School.” She joins us now in studio.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Nilo.

NILO TABRIZY: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what you understand took place. And it’s really hard right now with the internet almost totally turned off in Iran.

NILO TABRIZY: Yeah, absolutely. So, right now we’re not necessarily able to get in touch with eyewitnesses or, you know, friends and families of the young girls who were killed, but we were able to verify the video. So, there was one video that I saw probably around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday, and I was able to verify that and know that the video that we saw that showed at least, you know, half of the structure was hit. You know, two stories were torn down. The scene was really graphic. I saw things like a small child’s hand in the rubble, blood-stained backpacks, homework scattered everywhere. And so, when I see scenes like that, it’s important to verify and know that it’s from the current moment, so I was able to do that.

And then, once I found the location of the school itself, just being able to map, you know, some of the features we saw in the video with satellite imagery, I wanted to understand what was around there. You know, Minab is a small town in the southern Hormozgan province. I was trying to understand why the school was struck. What I saw, and what many others online saw, as well, is that it was close to an IRGC Navy barracks.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what the IRGC is.

NILO TABRIZY: The IRGC is the Revolutionary Guard. So, there was an IRGC, you know, Navy barracks around there. And I wanted to, you know, understand: Is this an issue of wrong targeting? Once I looked at satellite imagery, it was clear that for — years ago, it used to be part of — you know, it looked like it was very close to the base, part of the base. As far back as 2016, it was completely walled off. There was a separation between that school and the IRGC Navy barracks. And, as well, the walls of the school were painted with these bright murals. So, obviously, if I can see as an open-source investigator that as far back as, you know, eight years ago, these brightly colored walls are visible, I know that this is not part of an IRGC base, and so should anybody that’s adding this to a target list.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve reported that the pro-Pahlavi monarchy accounts have been spreading a narrative that this was a failed IRGC rocket. And explain what these forces are.

NILO TABRIZY: Yes. So, right now there’s — I think there’s a — people are trying to coopt a narrative or, you know, put forth what’s happening that feels convenient to the story that they want to push and the goals that they have. And right now it seems that any reporting on civilian casualties becomes a flashpoint. And there was one quite prominent user on X that tweeted out and said that this — that actually the Iranian state already took responsibility for the strike. So we started to look at that claim. The channel that they put forward was not an Iranian state official channel. It was a Telegram channel that’s a pro-monarchy channel. So, you can understand, OK, where this type of misinformation is starting to spread.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the response on the ground, this mass funeral that took place in Minab, and how the media is covering this around the world.

NILO TABRIZY: Yeah, I mean, many member — many journalists were quite horrified to see an attack like this. Right? The death toll is up to 175 people, many of them young schoolgirls. And right now I think people are trying to verify imagery of this. So, there were some claims saying, “Oh, this aerial imagery showing, you know, the small graves that were dug comes from a different image in Pakistan,” while there’s been a lot of great reporting, some by BBC, some by The New York Times, that have verified this aerial imagery and said that, no, indeed, this is of the current moment. This is for these funerals, as well. So, this is a incident that many of us are looking at, because it absolutely demands accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has the U.S. and Iran said?

NILO TABRIZY: The U.S. said that it was looking into this incident. And Iran has said this was on the fault of Israel, this is what happens in an air campaign. And we’re still trying to figure that out. So, as it stands, we need more information. Either we need remnants of the weapons that was used from the scene. We haven’t been able to obtain that. Or what would — another visual clue that would be helpful is to see the moment of impact. If we saw the missile hit, we could maybe look at the angle where it comes from and get more information.

So we still don’t exactly who did what. Some of the claims coming out, as well, just about the general operation, have said that Israel is mostly responsible for Tehran, you know, western Iran strikes, and that the southern Iran strikes are being done by the U.S., which is why some reporters have gone to the U.S. and asked for answers.

AMY GOODMAN: UNESCO says, “The killing of pupils in a place dedicated to learning constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law.” Nilo?

NILO TABRIZY: Absolutely. I mean, this is not — you know, a school for young girls is absolutely not a viable nor is it a legal target, especially as we’re trying to still understand the aims of this type of operation. It doesn’t seem a legitimate target based on the information that we know at all. And it really calls in — you know, it highlights that no matter if there’s an air campaign, whether the objectives are understood or not, that civilians will always pay the price in these types of conflicts. And right now it’s the young girls in Minab.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Nilo, for being with us, and ask you a final question. What most surprised you about this horrific attack?

NILO TABRIZY: I was surprised to see that people were trying to doubt it immediately, or saying that just because they’re civilian casualties, that’s an Islamic Republic talking point. No, these deaths happened. They’re important for us to investigate, and all of us should be interrogating what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: And can I ask you — you were with The Washington Post. We all know that The Washington Post has gutted its staff, laid off a third of the staff, almost the entire Middle East division. You should be doing this for The Washington Post. So, what’s happening without coverage?

NILO TABRIZY: Yeah, I mean, I would love to continue reporting this for the Post. That’s not what’s happening right now. I’m seeing my colleagues, that I deeply respect, that are still there, scrambling and trying to cover this important moment, but they’re not getting voices from inside Iran, and understandably. Connectivity is really difficult right now. That’s why you need reporters like myself, like my colleague Yeganeh, who was the bureau chief for Iran based in Turkey. That’s why this reporting is deeply important in this moment.

The article referred to in this segment:
newlinesmag.com/running-notes/investigation-debunks-claims-irgc-bombed-iranian-school/

This link doesn't seem to be clickable, so plug it into your search bar.

Update of 3/8:
This was a double-tap strike. Other schools have since been struck.

(With apologies to all of the good weasels out there.)

Regarding the hearing of Christi "Puppykiller" Noem this morning, which I listened to on KPFA, which broadcast nationally the first few hours of. No doubt that Democracy Now! will be covering this tomorrow morning, so I'll likely cover this more in depth then.

SO much weaseling, dodging, diversion, and blatant lying on Noem's part, as expected..

She very predictably, lied over and over, and wouldn't take responsibility for a single thing that she's cleary guilty of.

Her rhetoric was very dangerous to both Americans and undocumented immigrants.

Shervin Hajipour wrote this sad but beautiful Grammy winning song for the Woman Life Freedom protests a couple of years back, and it was also played and sung regularly in the recent Iranian Protests. He was thrown into prison for this, but he's now out, but under severe restrictions.

I wasn't able to get a link to work, (It's a conspiracy!) so search for
Shervin Hajipour - Woman Life Freedom


For dancing in the streets
For the fear when kissing
For my sister, your sister, our sisters
For changing rotten brains
For shame of money-lacking
For yearing of just normal life
For garbage boy and his dreams
For this planned economics
For this polluted air
For Valiasr and it's worn-out trees
For Piruz and his possible extinction
For dogs, innocent but banned
For tears with no end
For this moment will never happen again
For smiling faces
For students, for future
For this forced heaven
For the national elite imprisoned
For Afghan children
For all this "for"s with no repeat
For all this empty chants
For houses, collapsing like card ones
For the feel of peace
For the sun after long nights
For pills of nerves and insomnia
For men, homeland, development
For girls wishing to be boys
For women, life, freedom
For freedom
For freedom
For freedom

Boy, was posting this journal ever like pulling teeth. Every aspect of it fought me all the way.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3.....ran_war_israel

As we continue our coverage of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, we speak with Israeli analyst Ori Goldberg in Tel Aviv. He says “there is a broad embrace of this attack” among Israelis, bringing together the country’s liberal, right-wing, religious and settler groups.

“They all seem to agree, broadly and deeply, that this war is inevitable,” says Goldberg, who adds that nobody has articulated a clear strategic vision for the war. “Israel, over the past two-and-a-half years, has become exceedingly greedy. It doesn’t want to commit itself to anything. What Israel is fighting for is the right to be able to go off on such attacks whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for as long as it wants.”
-Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Israel has mobilized 100,000 reservists as it threatens to reinvade Lebanon. Lebanon’s Health Ministry says at least 31 people have been killed, nearly 150 wounded, since Israel launched renewed airstrikes on Beirut’s suburbs and other parts of Lebanon on Sunday. Tens of thousands of residents of southern and eastern Lebanon were seen fleeing their homes after Israel ordered people in nearly 50 villages to evacuate.
-Israel believes that rules apply to everyone but them.

Israel’s military says its renewed war on Lebanon comes in response to missiles and drones fired by Hezbollah in retaliation for the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They were Hezbollah’s first major violations of a ceasefire that took effect in November 2024. During that time, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, documented more than 15,000 ceasefire violations committed by Israel. Israeli police say nine people were killed after an Iranian missile attack on the central city of Beit Shemesh. Another strike killed a woman in Tel Aviv.

This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking Sunday.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] We are in a campaign in which we are bringing the full force of the IDF as never before to ensure our existence and our future. But we are also bringing into this campaign the assistance of the United States, my friend, U.S. President Donald Trump, and the U.S. military. And this combination of forces enables us to do what I have long hoped to do for 40 years, to strike the terror regime decisively. That is what I promised, and that is what we will do.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Ori Goldberg, Israeli political analyst, scholar in Tel Aviv, written extensively on Iran, Israel and the relationship between religion and politics in the Middle East.

Ori, thanks so much for being with us again. You were there for our special broadcast on Saturday. Can you talk about the response on the ground right now in Israel to the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran, and then the response by Iran?

ORI GOLDBERG: Well, as far as the Israeli general population goes, there is a broad embrace of this attack. In fact, the consensus, which so far during the protests against the Netanyahu government has been shushed and actively repressed, is now surfacing with full strength. That is the alliance between the Israeli liberals and the Israeli right, the settlers, the religious elements in the government. They all seem to agree, broadly and deeply, that this war is inevitable, that it must be carried out right now, and that it has — and Israel has absolutely no choice, and, of course, that this war will only end with a real toppling of the regime in Tehran, a campaign that can and should last as long as it takes, which is something our prime minister has said repeatedly over the last few days. Again, the population is resigned to this war. It supports it. It doesn’t appear to be jubilant. Nobody’s accepting Netanyahu’s boasts like they did after the IDF mobilized and invaded Gaza following the events of October 2023. But there’s a sense that this has to be done and we’re doing what has to be done.
-All out war on Iran with the cooperation of the US has lng been a wet dream of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the call for 100,000 Israeli reservists for the possible reinvasion of Lebanon?

ORI GOLDBERG: Well, the Israeli government mobilizes reservists with great ease, certainly now when the entire country is at a shutdown. It might have been a little more difficult had the country been in full working mode, but it most certainly is not. Most Israelis are shuttling between shelters and taking care of kids who are home from school, as the educational system is not working either. Mobilizing 100,000 reservists, as I said, is not that difficult.

Will Israel invade Lebanon? Particularly when we hear that the Lebanese prime minister has officially declared that the government of Lebanon forbids Hezbollah from operating in any sort of military capacity from Lebanese territory, I doubt very much that we will see another invasion of Lebanon. Israel so far seems quite pleased to be attacking, bombing, killing and destroying from the air, just as is the case with the United States in Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: How many times have you been sent into shelter, Ori? On Saturday, I think it was, we were up to 12 by the time we spoke at about 1:00 in the afternoon.

ORI GOLDBERG: Yes, and then I think we got to about 20. But it hasn’t really improved. The frequency has somewhat lessened, but we can get one sheltering order in place, then have it rescinded after 10 minutes, and then after two minutes have it on again — classically, overcompensation for the beginning of the Gaza, quote-unquote, “war,” when the IDF and the Israeli state were caught completely unprepared. Now the powers that be here seem to have reached a decision that it’s better to send the entire country into shelters than to have even one unnecessary casualty.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the negotiations that were happening in Geneva around Iran’s nuclear program, this happening in the midst of them as they were planning to continue this week? This is something that you’ve looked at continually.

ORI GOLDBERG: I’m not going to go off on a speculative tangent. I cannot corroborate this completely and positively. But to the best of my understanding, this was not the result of an operation meant to misdirect Iranian attention or meant to secure reasons for a preventive attack. If it was, then this isn’t a preventive attack. If this has been planned for months and years, then there’s no doubt that there’s nothing preventive or legal about it.

What I gather is that there was some convergence of intelligence. There was a realization that Iran’s senior leadership was going to meet, in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, in Tehran. This is the sort of tactical intelligence at which Israel excels. Israelis brought this to the attention of the United States. The forces were already in place, because, again, moving forces is easier than sending them into an actual war. Same case for the United States as it is for Israel. So the forces were already in place, and all that was needed was the spark of that particular meeting, where Israel and the United States believed that they could assassinate the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic
-Exactly.

They succeeded in everything that has happened since, pretty much, ever since the opening shock and awe enhanced, as it were, has, I think, been learning and working in motion. Targets have been identified for months and years. There’s no doubt that’s the case. But any kind of coherent, consequent logic that would be apparent in such a program, any kind of final goal, any kind of vision as to what regime change might actually include, that does not seem to be a part of either the Israeli or the American working plan in Iran at the moment. And in fact, President Trump could declare victory whenever he so chooses. He’s already assassinated the supreme leader. Israel could declare victory whenever it so chooses.
-Also exactly.

But Israel, over the past two-and-a-half years, has become exceedingly greedy. It doesn’t want to commit itself to anything. It actually, I think — what Israel is fighting for is the right to be able to go off on such attacks whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for as long as it wants. So, don’t expect Israel to come to a political realization that this might end. Again, the population supports Prime Minister Netanyahu. The opposition has officially disbanded itself and declared that there were no coalition or opposition now, just the united people of Israel. So, don’t look to Israel for any kind of political statement.

-This is how Israel and the US are increasingly becoming worldwide pariahs.

---

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/2/iran_reed_brody

The United States and Israel launched a devastating war against Iran on Saturday without approval by the U.S. Congress or support from the United Nations Security Council, making President Donald Trump’s attack illegal under both domestic and international law, says veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

“The U.N. Charter is not ambiguous,” says Brody. “President Trump has presumptively committed … the international crime of aggression, as he did in Venezuela and just as Vladimir Putin did in Ukraine.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

The United States and Israel are facing global condemnation for launching unilateral attacks on Iran without seeking approval of the U.N. Security Council.

We go now to France, where we’re joined by Reed Brody, longtime war crimes prosecutor, member of the International Commission of Jurists, author of To Catch a Dictator.

Reed, if you can respond to what has taken place, the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, and then Iran retaliating by sending missiles and drones throughout the Gulf and against Israel?

REED BRODY: Sure, Amy. I mean, look, whatever you think of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, these attacks by the U.S. and Israel are a clear violation of the foundational principle of the postwar legal order, which is the nonuse of force. So, the U.N. Charter is not ambiguous. Article 2, Section 4 prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or the political independence of any state. And there are only two exceptions: one, if the Security Council authorizes it, which obviously nobody saw here, or self-defense. And that means self-defense in response to an actual or an imminent armed attack. And here, there was no — it’s obvious there was no such imminent attack. President Trump even said last year that he had obliterated Iran’s nuclear capacity. As you’ve reported, both sides had just concluded the most intensive round of nuclear talks. So there was no immediate threat here. And so, President Trump has presumptively committed the crime, the international crime, of aggression, as he did in Venezuela and as — and just as Vladimir Putin did in Ukraine. And at the Nuremberg trials, the supreme international crime was considered to be aggression, crimes against peace
-Israel and Trump don't give a shit about the rule of law. "Might makes right," remember?

It’s also important to remember that under U.S. law, as you’ve put it, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. And this is not some quaint historical debate. The framers were very cognizant that executives, that kings start war, and that war is the most consequential decision that a nation can take, and it should not be left to a single person’s judgment. The framers had seen the alternative, the royal prerogative of bringing a war, and that was precisely the kind of tyranny they wanted to avoid, that one person, on a whim, or for whatever — I mean, obviously, they had — I don’t think the founders ever imagined that they would have a president who would launch a war because he was dropping in the polls or because he wanted to divert from the Epstein files or because he had — he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. But, you know, it is a foundational principle here that the president cannot just declare, decide to go to war. He can do it in an emergency. And that’s why the Constitution says — doesn’t say that only the Congress can make war, because they allow the president in the case of an emergency, but not to declare war and keep a war going.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds. President Trump now told The Atlantic magazine, “They want to talk, and I’ve agreed to talk, so I’ll be talking to them,” as the U.S. and Israel strikes Iran hundreds of times, and apparently the Pentagon, the president is saying, this will go on for weeks.

REED BRODY: Well, you know, I mean, we’re shifting — I mean, this shows that there was no plan here. The whole reason — I mean, one of the main reasons to have, you know, this constitutional provision is so that a war can be deliberated, so you understand what a war is about. You go to the people, you go to the Congress —

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

REED BRODY: — you deliberate, and you decide as a nation there should be a war or there shouldn’t be.

-This, unfortunately, ignores the fact that the damage is now done, and The guilty parties refuse to be responsible for the outcome. It's easy to decapitate a regime, but impossible to predict or control what the outcome of that will actually be.

WTF?! Y'mean, like in Venezuela?

Marco Rubio, of course, is working on this.

Yet more typically ignorant imperialist shit from Trump and Rubio.

This action will have an unpredictable outcome and likely result in chaos. Do we really never learn anything?

"One day, everyone will have always been against this".

He's joined Israel's euphemistically titled "Combat operation" against Iran. Israel has struck and killed the Ayatollah in an airstrike, as well as his wife, his daughter, her husband, and his grandchild. A number of government officials and others have also been killed.

This story is still unfolding, so new details are still coming in minute by minute.

Here is a transcript of his announcement:

A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.

Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.
-Iran has never directly endangered the US.

For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted 'Death to America' and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.

-Gee, wonder why some Iranians would chant "Death to America", or "Death to Israel"?

Among the regime's very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days.

In 1983, Iran's proxies carried out the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel.
-Iran doesn't have true proxies who do whtever they say. They do have friends and associates who are sympathetic to them and may sometimes help them, or be helped by them. The American press often fall into the trap of referring to them as proxies.

In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole. Many died. Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq.

The regime's proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as US naval and commercial vessels and international shipping lanes.

It's been mass terror, and we're not going to put up with it any longer. From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained, and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts.
-One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. -See the terrorist state of Israel.

And it was Iran's proxy Hamas that launched the monstrous October 7th attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before.

Iran is the world's number one state sponsor of terror and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested.

It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular, my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I'll say it again - can never have a nuclear weapon.
-Iran doesn't even want nuclear weapons. Trump said yesterday that "Iran refused to say that they'd never have nuclear weapons", ignoring how many times they've said that they wouldn't.

That is why in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime's nuclear programme at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

After that attack, we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal.

We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. Again, they wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. They didn't know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.
-What a load of garbage.

But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades. They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions. And we can't take it anymore.

Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland.
-They have every right to have a nuclear program for peaceful purposes, and even US and Israeli intelligence, as well as the IAEA have said there's no evidence that they're trying to build nukes.

Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message.

For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.

We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally - again - obliterated. We are going to annihilate their Navy.
-Somthis will be full scale war. What of the Iranian's sovereignty and right to defend themselves against aggressors?

We're going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilise the region or the world and attack our forces and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans.

And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.

It's a very simple message: they will never have a nuclear weapon. This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces. I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration.

There is no military on earth, even close to its power, strength, or sophistication. My administration has taken every possible step to minimise the risk to US personnel in the region. Even so, and I do not make this statement lightly, the Iranian regime seeks to kill.
-That's right. The US, bully of the world.

The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we're doing this not for now. We're doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission.
-Truly noble.

We pray for every service member as they selflessly risk their lives to ensure that Americans and our children will never be threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran.

We ask God to protect all of our heroes in harm's way, and we trust that with his help, the men and women of the armed forces will prevail. We have the greatest in the world. And they will prevail.

To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces, and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity or in the alternative face certain death.

So lay down your arms, you will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death.
-Yeah, that'll happen.

Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.

Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government.

It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations. For many years you have asked for America's help, but you never got it.
-As if. If he actually cared about the people of Iran he wouldn't be doing this.

No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want.

So let's see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach.

This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass. May God bless the brave men and women of America's armed forces. May God bless the United States of America. May God bless you all. Thank you."

-Trump has claimed to be the "Peace president", but may end up being the Piece president instead, by leaving the world in pieces. No attempt at decapitation of a regime in history has ever been successful by airstrikes alone, and the US isn't prepared to put boots on the ground.

This attack follows the timeline of the previous US attack on Iran exactly. We're in nuclear talks, Israel attacks, and the US immediately joins in, then it's later revealed that the US was complicit all along.

If the decapitation is successful, the ultimate results are uncertain. It could lead to the IRGC taking control, which could be even worse than the Ayatollah. It could also lead to a civil war and the fracturing of Iran along partisan and ethnic lines. This could end up leading to regional, or even world war, as well as fleeing refugees. Iran is a large nation with 92 million people.

Trump also ducked a vote on a war resolution act, which is now scheduled for this week, which could reaffirm congress's authority to declare any war.

He claimed that he was interested in stopping the ability for Iran to ever build a nuke when we attacked them in june, when he claimed that their program was "Obliterated", which few believed. Now it's regime change. Both Israel and the US have nukes, so I don't see how they can justify saying that Iran can't ever have any, particularly since Israel is a rogue nuclear state. Of course I also believe that no one should be allowed to have nukes.

Reportedly one missile strike hit a girls' school in Tehran, killing around 175 students between the ages of seven to twelve, as well as teachers. A hospital has aso been struck.

Iran has struck back, closing the Strait of Hormuz, and firing missiles at Israel, of course, but also at US bases in Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, the UAE, and Iraq. Most of these missiles have been intercepted. One foreign worker was killed by falling debris from an interception in Abu Dhabi, and another person was killed there where the Airport was hit. They have also targeted Saudi Arabia. Four people were killed by a missile strike in Syria, though that wasn't confirmed as being from Iran.

An apartment building was struck in Israel, resulting in one woman's death.

This appalling story took place in in Albany New York, because DHS has no protocols for contacting the relatives of people who they release. This man was blind, and didn't speak English.

Yet another death that DHS is completely at fault for/

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2.....amin_shah_alam

The funeral for 56-year-old Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a disabled Rohingya refugee from Burma who was found dead after he was abandoned by Border Patrol agents miles away from his home, was held yesterday in Buffalo, New York. Local reporter J. Dale Shoemaker, who first reported on Shah Alam’s disappearance for the Buffalo news organization Investigative Post, explains what we know about the case.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report, as we turn to a horrifying story out of Buffalo, New York—it has sent shockwaves through the community—where a disabled Rohingya refugee from Burma, also known as Myanmar, was found dead five days after he was abandoned by Border Patrol agents about five miles from his home.

56-year-old Nurul Amin Shah Alam was mostly blind, spoke no English, in the country legally. His family told reporters no one at the Department of Homeland Security warned them or his lawyers that he had been released from jail last Thursday and dropped off alone outside a closed coffee shop on a cold winter night. He wandered around in orange booties issued by the Erie County Holding Center for days before Buffalo police found his dead body on Tuesday. Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan excoriated CBP at a press conference Thursday.

MAYOR SEAN RYAN: I issued an order a few weeks ago saying the Buffalo Police Department will not interact or help the Department of Homeland Security in their civil immigration enforcement actions. The incident that we are talking about makes it so of course we should, because the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol and ICE, they don’t know what they are doing.

And it has been demonstrated. A Border Patrol agent picked up this man from the Holding Center custody, drove him to an ICE facility, and the ICE facility said, “We don’t want this guy.” Then the Border Patrol officers had no protocol of what to do with a disabled man who doesn’t speak English, who was confused and lost. And you know what they did? They dropped him at a closed coffee shop. That’s why we do not cooperate with ICE, Homeland Security and Border Patrol.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Buffalo mayor. As congressional leaders and others across New York demand answers, calls for an investigation into the Border Patrol are growing louder. For more we’re joined from Buffalo by J. Dale Shoemaker, a reporter for Investigative Post, who has been closely following this story and attended Nurul Amin Shah Alam’s funeral yesterday. Thank you so much for being with us. Can you explain how this happened? His family did not know that Customs and Border Patrol had left him in the cold at night, and he died there?

J. DALE SHOEMAKER: The key issue here seems to be a miscommunication—on whose part we’re still trying to figure out—as to which immigration agency was going to take custody of Mr. Shah Alam after he was released from the holding center. His attorneys believed it was ICE who was going to take custody of him and so they were waiting for him at the local ICE detention center the next day to get him out. His attorneys had confirmed, in fact, that ICE did not want custody of him. ICE’s attorney said, “We don’t want this guy.”

In fact it was Border Patrol who the Erie County Sheriff’s Office called. They took him in their system, saw that ICE didn’t want to have custody of him, and then instead of, in their words, releasing him from the Border Patrol station, gave him a quote-unquote “courtesy ride” to the closed Tim Hortons. My colleague was there the other day and confirmed that while the drive-thru of that coffee shop was open, the lobby was not. He was not able to enter and sit down in the quote-unquote “warm, safe location” that Border Patrol said it was.

He then wandered the city for several days. When the 911 call came in, the woman who called said that she had seen him three hours earlier alive but did not call until three hours later when he was dead. This is somewhat ironic because Buffalo calls itself the “City of Good Neighbors” yet there were many people over the course of those five days who saw him, perhaps even interacted with him, and did nothing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dale, this was a person who was a refugee in the country? What have you been able to tell about why he was jailed for a year originally?

J. DALE SHOEMAKER: This is a tragic situation. He was resettled in Buffalo by one of our refugee resettlement agencies. He was living in Malaysia for a period of about a decade, I am told, before eventually being allowed into the United States as a legal refugee in December 2024. Now as I’m sure you know, the winters in Buffalo are pretty cold and he was used to warmer climates. So he and his family were cooped up in their new home in Buffalo for several weeks.

We had a sunny day in February last year and he decided to venture outside for a walk. He is nearly blind. He has got totally no vision in one eye and he has partial a little bit blurry vision in another eye. He sets out for a walk in his neighborhood in the West Side of Buffalo and makes his way to a store where he purchases a curtain rod to use as a walking stick.

When the weather turned bad, he got lost in the neighborhood, which again he was new to. He ends up in the backyard of a woman on Tonawanda Street. When he’s there, the woman thinks he’s breaking in. She says he let the dog out when he went into the backyard. Police roll up and they come in hot. We got the body camera footage yesterday showing that the moment that officers arrive they are screaming at him to drop his weapon—that’s his curtain rod—and to submit for arrest, basically. They, in the body camera footage that we reviewed, say after he is in handcuffs that they nearly pulled out their guns and shot him.

He is then charged with assault. He again speaks no English so he had no idea what was going on. He had no idea where he was or what these officers were ordering him to do. So once he is on the ground with these officers, he does bite them at one point and he gets charged with assault. He is taken to the jail.

At that time, the attorneys and the family agree that if he was bailed out at that point in time, ICE would take custody of him and he might get disappeared into the ICE detention system in the United States or possibly even deported to a country that he was not familiar with. Instead of letting that—

AMY GOODMAN: Dale, we just have 30 seconds. Your final words?

J. DALE SHOEMAKER: Instead of letting him get bailed out, they let him sit there. He pleads out earlier this year and that is when the issue with Border Patrol happens. They pick him up with no notice, no warning, and they drop him at the coffee shop.

This is about Columbia student Ellie Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE agents under false pretenses, and other Columbia students and protesters for speaking out for Palestine. Columbia grad student Mohsen Madawi is interviewed here.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2.....lumbia_student

Federal agents detained a Columbia University student early Thursday after Department of Homeland Security officers allegedly gained access to a university-owned residence by presenting a fake missing person poster of a 5-year-old. As news broke of the student, Ellie Aghayeva, and her detention, students and community members rallied en masse demanding her release and an end to immigration enforcement on campus. Due to restrictions implemented by the university in response to pro-Palestine protests, the students were unable to protest on campus proper, but instead took to nearby streets.

Aghayeva was released Thursday afternoon, shortly after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani brought up her case during a meeting with President Donald Trump to discuss housing. “For that decision to be quickly flipped is remarkable because it shows the power of opposition, but also how loose and flippant these arrests are, and how maybe unnecessary they are,” says Zeteo’s Prem Thakker, who has been reporting on the case.

Columbia’s active response, including its legal support of Aghayeva, marked a departure from previous high-profile immigration arrests of its students. Mohsen Mahdawi, a former Columbia University student who last year was also detained by DHS, says Aghayeva’s arrest in campus housing is a direct result of the university administration’s abdication of its responsibility to protect its students. “Columbia University administration did not have the backbone, in fact, to file any lawsuits against the Trump administration for violating basic rights,” says Mahdawi. “This is actually what the Trump administration intended to do, which is to fracture liberal institutions and turn the administrations against their students.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González.

Here in New York City, a Columbia undergraduate student was detained by ICE agents early Thursday morning at her off-campus residence. The agents gained entry to the residential building by pretending to be police looking for a missing child. The student, Elmina Aghayeva, posted about her arrest early in the morning on Instagram saying, ”DHS illegally arrested me.
Please help.”

She was released just hours later following a meeting between New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Trump. Mamdani posted on social media, “Just got off the phone with President Trump. In our meeting earlier, I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elina Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE this morning. He has just informed me that she will be released imminently.” During Mamdani’s meeting with Trump, he also requested four other cases in New York be dropped, those of Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia. This is Columbia University President Claire Shipman.

CLAIRE SHIPMAN: We are all so relieved that our student Ellie Aghayeva has been released from federal custody. Let me give you some details about what happened this morning. Shortly after 6:00 a.m., five federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, without any kind of warrant, entered in off-campus Columbia residential building. The agents gained entry by stating they were police searching for a missing child. They made their way to the apartment of the student they were targeting with the same story. Our security cameras captured the agents in the hallway showing pictures of the alleged missing child. Once inside the apartment, it became clear they had misrepresented themselves. A public safety officer arrived, asked multiple times for a warrant which was not produced, and asked for time to call his boss, which was not given.

The agents took our student. This was a frightening and fast-moving situation and utterly unacceptable for our students and staff. We started work immediately to gain her release. We are so grateful for the help and support we got from the mayor and the governor. Let me be clear: Misrepresenting identity and other facts to gain access to a residential building is a breach of protocol. All law enforcement agencies are obligated to follow established legal, ethical standards. Let me also add, nobody in our administration has ever provided any assistance to DHS or ICE as regards arresting or taking any of our students. Quite the opposite. We have labored often intensively behind the scenes to see them supported.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Columbia president Claire Shipman responding to the arrest of Ellie Aghayeva, the detention of her. She didn’t release a video talking about Mayor Mamdani’s request for the four other students to have their cases dropped. We’re going to speak with Columbia graduate Mohsen Mahdawi. One of the people who wasn’t a Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia, is still in detention almost a year after participating in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia.

First we’re going to Washington D.C. where we are joined by Prem Thakker, political correspondent and columnist for Zeteo News. On Thursday, he reported on the dizzying sequence of events in the arrest and the release of Ellie. Prem, can you respond to what took place yesterday? Using false pretenses, saying they were New York Police, apparently—this is ICE—to get into Columbia’s residential housing? And using a picture of a five-year-old child to say they were looking for a missing person?

PREM THAKKER: Thank you both for having me. Yes, when you lay it out it’s as shocking as it sounds. And I will tell you what—when I was first made aware of it, I was getting flashbacks to when I was first flagged of Mahmoud Khalil’s taking, almost a year ago. As you say, the sort of dizzying nature of it was descriptive of it.

At first it was very clear to me based on different accounts from sources that something awry had gone on with how DHS had sought to breach this Columbia building. Claire Shipman, the president, very quickly, as she announced it, had said that there were some false pretenses being had and how the agents had tried to get in. And even over the course of the following hours, before Shipman made that subsequent announcement in the evening as you described, many sources were describing to me the sense that something was wrong, that the agents had impersonated officers, that they were there pretending to be doing something they weren’t.

And I just want to underscore something that is important I think for viewers to understand. Right now the Department of Homeland Security’s budget—its very bloated budget—is at stake because of massive public horror at its acts including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In that time, this is how DHS is choosing to behave. They allegedly are impersonating officers, pretending to be looking for a missing child, all to get into a university building to detain someone. And then, I might add, apparently lying about it. Because when we asked DHS about this, they explicitly said, “Our agents did not and would never impersonate NYPD officers.” And yet Claire Shipman, the president of Columbia, is saying, and based on security camera footage, that these agents did in fact impersonate police. So this is how DHS is behaving even while their budget is at stake. And if that is the case, what does that tell you as an American about how DHS takes your concerns?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Prem, what can you tell us in terms of this involvement of Mayor Mamdani in getting Trump to release Ellie Aghayeva?

PREM THAKKER: Yes. One thing that should be underscored—and I’m sure this will be talked about more with Mohsen as well—is that yesterday was a remarkable expression from city officials, from city council folks to members of Congress in New York City to of course Zohran Mamdani, that was very concerted, very synchronized in expressing condemnation to this arrest. And that also included of course Columbia’s strong response. They were very outwardly insistent on how they were legally supporting Ellie, something that they didn’t always express with previous detentions.

And so all of that culminated in Zohran Mamdani’s surprise afternoon visit to Washington, D.C.— which coincided with this arrest, funnily enough I suppose—where he was visiting Donald Trump to pitch a housing project, a very ambitious housing project that he could request Donald Trump’s support in. During that meeting is when Zohran Mamdani also expressed his concerns about the arrest of Ellie, as well as, as you mentioned, the ongoing cases against Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Leqaa Kordia—who is of course still in detention—and then Mohsen Mahdawi.

Minutes later after that meeting, Mamdani gets a phone call from Trump saying that Ellie will be imminently released. And then moments after that, Ellie posts on her Instagram story saying she is freed. And so that instantaneous reaction by Donald Trump to go ahead and make a phone call to release Ellie is remarkable not just because of how quickly that was able to be done, but because it really puts a thumb in the face of DHS, who lied in order to breach a Columbia University campus building to detain someone. And all for that decision to be quickly flipped is remarkable because it shows the power of opposition but also how loose and flippant these arrests are and how maybe unnecessary they are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to one of the people who Mayor Mamdani raised. In addition to calling for the release of Ellie, which happened immediately, Mayor Mamdani called for the dismissal of cases against the Columbia student—now graduate—Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi— who like Yunseo Chung and Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia was involved with pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, were all jailed. The question is, did Columbia intervene in those cases?

Mohsen Mahdawi is now a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International Affairs, SIPA. Mohsen, if you can talk about your response to what happened yesterday—there was mass protest, Hundreds of people came out to protest Ellie’s arrest—and the shock of that? But also who President Shipman is willing to talk about and intervene on behalf of and who she isn’t.

*MOHSEN MAHDAWI: Good morning, Amy, and thank you for having me. This highlights the serious hypocrisy and discrimination that Columbia University has. I am glad that the president, Claire Shipman, has shared that she is thrilled and relieved for the release of Ellie, as she should. And she should also check on her, meet with her, offer her with the support legally—legal support, psychological support and financial support after this terror.

But let’s be clear—Columbia has participated in allowing this to happen and that’s because they have failed to stand up for their students. For me, for Mahmoud, for Yunseo, and for Ranjani and for Leqaa as well. And this, what we see—DHS coming back to Columbia residential—because Columbia University administration did not have the backbone in fact to file any lawsuits against the Trump administration for violating basic rights. And now, yes, she is free, but will Columbia University file a lawsuit based on this scam that DHS has done? Where is the accountability in this?

In addition to this, Amy, I want the viewers to ask the question why students are protesting at the streets, not inside campus. And the reason is because the university administration itself has participated in destroying and in deteriorating the democratic practices here, free speech. They chilled the speech on campus to the point that the students feel more safe being under the risk of being detained or attacked by ICE or police outside of campus. Because the university has cracked down against the pro-Palestine movements and has made an example of more than 100 students between suspension and expulsion. This is the chilling effect that the university administration and the dirty work that it is doing.

I love my university and that’s the reason why I chose to come to Columbia. But what the senior administration is doing and the hypocrisy that we are seeing—when I was released, there was not a video. There was not a word that says, “I’m thrilled and relieved.” And there has not been any attempt to reach out to me and to offer me direct support by the senior administration. This is an issue you might see like a micro issue, but this is actually what the Trump administration intended to do, which is to fracture liberal institutions and turn the administrations against their students. And they have succeeded, because the Columbia administration and many other administrations have capitulated and have made deals with the Trump administration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The impact on the student body, especially the graduate students, given that such a large percentage—I’ve heard as many as 40% of graduate students at Columbia are international students from other countries—the impact of this continued repression of Columbia against dissent by students?

*MOHSEN MAHDAWI: The impact is huge. When we talk about 40%, it is more than one third of the university. We are talking about 14,000 students roughly. I was in D.C. yesterday and the shockwave of this, or the wave shock of this terror that ICE has brought to campus, triggering so many students who were here when many other students were detained on campus, has actually chilled—it has scared many students. My phone was literally tens of messages that are coming to me from international students and from actually students who are citizens, either checking on me if I am okay—because they have not disclosed the name first—or asking for legal resources because they are afraid to leave their apartments and campus as international students.

The chilling effect is real because I see it in classes. Even when I speak—especially when I speak with my fellow students who are international about their mind, about their way of thinking, they are afraid to write their beliefs on papers because they don’t trust the university that it would keep those papers and their thoughts away from the government. This is chilling speech.

Forensic Architecture and Earshot have spent the last year researching the Massacre of fifteen medical and UN aid workers on March 23rd 2025 at Tel Al-Sultan in Gaza. Here's what they found:

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2.....sacre_forensic

-I first wrote about this here: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal.....?#jid:11108680

It’s been almost one year since Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers in a brutal two-hour massacre on a vehicle convoy in southern Gaza. Israeli soldiers had attempted to cover it up by burying the bodies in a shallow mass grave, and crushing the rescue vehicles with heavy machinery, but a new investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot has recreated a minute-by-minute accounting of what took place. Director of Earshot Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who analyzed audio from video evidence alongside witness accounts, calls the Israeli response to the attack an “obstruction of justice.” He says “there is no reason why the Israeli army, with all of its GPS coordinates, its drones in the sky, couldn’t have done this internal investigation at a way higher resolution than we can have done.”

“We’ve been able to show that the attack continues for over two hours — until 7 a.m. in the morning, where we have the last recording of the night,” says Samaneh Moafi, assistant director of research at Forensic Architecture.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Gaza, where almost one year ago, Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers in a sustained two-hour attack on a rescue convoy and then attempted to cover it up. The soldiers buried 14 bodies in a shallow mass grave and crushed the rescue vehicles with heavy machinery. The ambush took place in the early hours of March 23, 2025, in the area of Tel al-Sultan in southern Gaza. Those killed included eight aid workers with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, six Palestinian civil defense workers and a U.N. relief agency staffer.

The independent research groups Forensic Architecture and Earshot have painstakingly recreated a minute-by-minute accounting of what took place. The 11-month investigation draws on audio and video recordings from the scene, open source and satellite imagery, and the in-depth testimony of two survivors. This is a clip.

ASSAAD AL-NASSASRA: [translated] To give you an idea, it was still dark. We crossed the ambush site without noticing the vehicle. Then we met Saleh and Ashtraf’s ambulance at the Iqlimi crossroad.

AMY GOODMAN: Forensic Architecture built a 3D model based on the testimony and available visuals, while Earshot used echolocation to analyze the more than 900 shots fired. They concluded that Israeli forces were in an elevated position when they began firing, then moved towards the aid workers while continuously firing.

Paramedic Rifaat Radwan was recording on his cell phone from inside one of the vehicles when the attack started, showing the ambulances had their lights on when the attack started, contradicting Israel’s initial claim that the convoy had approached suspiciously with their lights off.

[sounds of gunfire]

AMY GOODMAN: The sounds of Israeli gunfire were recovered when Radwan’s cell phone was found after his body was exhumed. For more, we are joined by two of the investigators. Samaneh Moafi is assistant director of research with Forensic Architecture. Lawrence Abu Hamdan is the founder and director of Earshot. He has been described as a “private ear” rather than a private eye for his work as an audio investigator, was recently profiled by The New Yorker Magazine. They are both joining us from London. Samaneh, why don’t we start with you? Tell us about the day, what happened, what was understood at the time, and then what you found as you dissected what took place.

SAMANEH MOAFI: On the day, shortly before 4:00 a.m. in the morning, there is an airstrike in Al-Hashashin. Two Red Crescent ambulances are sent to rescue those who are injured, and one of them loses contact. So, time passes. The Red Crescent sends more ambulances to search for the lost ambulance. Then they’re joined by a civil defense ambulance and a fire truck. They find the missing ambulance. They approach it. Then, upon approaching, they’re shot at again. Our investigation brings and shows a detailed analysis of what exactly took place minute by minute from the beginning to the days and weeks and months that followed.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Samaneh, could you also talk about the broader context in which this incident occurred? What the situation was in Gaza at the time when this incident occurred on March 23, last year, 2025?

SAMANEH MOAFI: Of course. A ceasefire had began in January in Gaza on the 19th of January. On the 18th of March, the ceasefire is broken by a series of nighttime airstrikes by the Israeli military. About 400 Palestinians are killed in these nighttime strikes. We have on the 20 of March leaflets dropped by the Israeli military across Gaza with genocidal messages.

The incident, this airstrike in Al-Hashashin, happens on 23rd of March, so 5 days after the break of the ceasefire by the Israeli military. Then the attack happens on one of the ambulances, then it is followed by a kind of an attack and an execution of a convoy of rescue workers who come searching for the missing ambulance.

Then I can kind of also say what happens after. We’ve been able to show that the attack continues for over two hours. So until 7:00 a.m. in the morning where we have the last recording of the night, we can hear sounds of shooting. At about 8:30 a.m., leaflets are dropped in Tel al-Sultan telling people to evacuate their homes.

At this time, we also have a series of earth berms beginning on this area. So we have the construction of pits that then are used for interrogation. We have the construction of checkpoints. And on the very same road, we have the burying of the bodies and we have the burying and crushing of the ambulances and the emergency vehicles. By this point, two U.N. vehicles have also arrived on site and were also attacked.

One of the two survivors of the incident from the Red Crescent, Munther Abed, was used as what he described as a kind of human tool to monitor the checkpoint, to do the work for the Israeli military, to separate Palestinian men from women and then put the ones that the Israelis are saying into interrogation pits. So that is kind of like the early hours. We see the construction of these earth berms at a satellite image that is available from 11:00 a.m. on that morning.
-Interrogation pits. What kind of country does this?

Now, what follows is a destruction of—a clearing of Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, of Rafah. Then what we have is a kind of a turn. We have the militarization of aid. By this point, there has been months that no aid is entering Gaza, and we have kind of like a construction of four sites for distribution of aid. But of course what they’re doing is luring Palestinians in so that they would be killed again. One of these aid distribution sites is actually constructed right by the site of the massacre and the execution of aid workers in Tel al-Sultan.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Lawrence Abu Hamdan into this conversation, this amazing story, the crushing of the ambulances and burying them to hide what had taken place. But Lawrence, can you explain the role of your organization, Earshot, in analyzing the gunshots, what exactly took place, what you found, how many shooters, their locations? Again, you have been called, rather than a private eye, a “private ear.”

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN: Thank you so much for having us. This is a classic case for an organization like Earshot. We do audio analysis for human rights and environmental advocacy. When we have a case like this where the evidence is really heard but not so much seen—because the main piece of evidence that was taken by Rifaat Radwan, he was holding the camera to his chest as he was covering from the gunfire. And so you see very little but you hear almost everything that happens. And you hear it in stereo. So what we could do is over 11 months analyze each of those gunshots and sort of piece together the whole story of what happened.

What we found out is that they start firing from an elevated position where the vehicles would have been in full view, about 40 meters to the southeast of Rifaat’s position. Then they begin advancing after about four minutes of gunfire. This is really intense gunfire. So in those first five minutes, you are talking about 850 shots fired.

Towards the last minute and thirty seconds of that video, the Israeli soldiers walk in as they’re firing. They move at a walking pace of about one meter per second. Then they arrive at the position of the aid workers. There we start to hear new echoes that we don’t hear on the rest of the recording. Those are the echoes reflecting off the ambulances themselves, indicating that the soldiers are in and amongst the ambulances as they are firing at the aid workers for the last shots. These are when the video cuts, and we assume these are the moments of the execution. They’re within meters of the aid workers.

And actually our analysis could go one step further, is that by sort of looking at the orientation and the organization of the ambulance around the shooter, we could see which was the most likely one that was producing each echo. So each shot produced three echoes and we could configure that and triangulate that between the echoes to find that for one of the shots, the 862nd shot fired that night, was fired from as close as one meter, to one of the paramedic’s— Ashraf Abu Labda’s—position. This is the moment where we hear the last sounds of him, his last voice, his final movements, which really suggests that this is the shot that executed him.

Another key part of our audio analysis was to confirm the witnesses, the survivors, as really the most reliable source of documentation for this event. In every key moment, we could corroborate what they said and how they explained the event, including some very small details that we could hear and pick up. The movements [inaudible] as someone tried to escape, we hear it on the recording. The use of specific weapons that happened much later, two hours later.

So I really want to push that forward while I am with you today is that it took a year’s worth of work for us to really corroborate those testimony, but those survivors have been saying this information all along. So we are trying to get them the audibility with this case. We want them to be heard finally as the most reliable narrators of this event and to amplify their voices.

And we see this time and time again. We also, together with Forensic Architecture, published our joint investigation to the killing of Hind Rajab. Again, Hind says it over and over again—”The tank is next to me. They’re firing at me.” It took our work to show that yes, the tank was 12 meters away. But she’s not a tragic victim of war; She is a witness to the crimes being perpetrated against her. And we’re trying to get Palestinians that audibility by listening so intensely to these crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Hind is a little five-year-old, six-year-old girl who was killed by an Israeli tank. Her whole family, her aunt and uncle and her cousins, had already been killed in this car and [inaudible] made a documentary The Voice of Hind Rajab that tells her story.

Following an internal military inquiry, the commanding officer—back to the killing of the Palestinian aid workers—of the 14th Brigade received a letter of reprimand for “his overall responsibility for the incident.” And the deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion involved in the incident was dismissed from his position due to “his responsibilities as the field commander and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief.” No criminal actions recommended by the inquiry.

Lawrence, finally, as we only have a minute to go, if you can comment on this? And also your being able to figure out some of the names, if only the first names, of the Israeli shooters, the Israeli assassins.

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN: With the really limited resources we’ve had—two phone calls to the Palestinian Red Crescent headquarters and one recording taken under extreme duress—we have been able to piece together this crime. There is no reason why the Israeli Army with all of its GPS coordinates, its drones in the sky, couldn’t have done this internal investigation at a way higher resolution than we have done. So we expect this is simply an obstruction of justice. It is a flagrant war crime to attack medics and to kill them and execute them from meters away. And so we just do not find it adequate at all, the response to this crime.